Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Appreciate help with dotLRN performance

Collapse
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
A resident set size of 61 MB for your AOLserver is a "huge chunk of memory"? I don't think so. In your top output above, note that nsd is only taking 6% of your memory. That's not large, that's trivially small.
Collapse
Posted by Shankar Venkatagiri on
Thanks for the clarification. What I notice is that these processes don't "quit". Here's a sampler:

shikshan  1789  0.6  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:12 [nsd]
shikshan  1790  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]
shikshan  1791  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]
shikshan  1792  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]
shikshan  1797  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:01 [nsd]
shikshan  1798  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]
shikshan  1799  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:01 [nsd]
shikshan  1800  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:01 [nsd]
shikshan  1801  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]
shikshan  1802  0.0  4.7 54276 48848 ?      S    11:36  0:00 [nsd]

Any clues? Also, does using Apache instead of AOLServer improve my situation?

Thanks in advance -
Shankar

Collapse
Posted by Jeff Davis on
AOLserver is multithreaded so what you are seeing is multiple threads in one process, not processes that fail to exit.

Using apache might improve your situation immensely but I doubt it will do so if you intend to run OpenACS.

Collapse
Posted by Shankar Venkatagiri on

Thanks for the pointer, Jeff. I reported the server's response to ps almost 10 minutes after my last interaction with dotLRN. The same processes linger on even now, five hours after I last posted the previous message. Could this indicate un-exiting processes?

I will go ahead and test dotLRN out with apache. I do not, however, seem to understand the distinction between OpenACS and dotLRN. My bad!

Shankar

Collapse
Posted by Jeff Davis on
Neither dotLRN nor OpenACS will work under apache (well, you might be able to fight with mod_aolserver for a few months and get it to run acceptibly but I certainly would not recommend it). I don't really think of dotLRN as being seperate from OpenACS (rather it is a particular install of OpenACS).

You also don't seem to understand the difference between a thread and a process. AOLServer is multithreaded, it creates threads within the server process to handle requests and typically those threads do not go away until the server process exits. ps on linux has the annoying -- not sure if you would call it a feature or a bug -- that it displays threads like they are processes, these don't really take any extra memory than is already taken by the server (note how they are all listed as being the same size and were all created at the same time -- thats because its all just the same server process).