Forum OpenACS Development: Re: OpenACS Performance Tests

It would be certainly an interesting project to build something like OpenACS based on a P2P-network and DHTs (cassandra, bigtable, ... coral, cfs, oceanstore .... pier), but this will be a different project, since some basic assumption about the data storage are different.

Sure, DHT is just the basic workhorse, most of the other examples have also quite different properties than e.g. cassandra. What is the problem with the term "project"? xotcl-core and xowiki went out to be compatible with the acs data model. There is nothing wrong in having a project developing an acs package based on p2p technology. Many people will appreciate it. From the scope of the work, it is a project.

Now, an interesting argument would be the one that makes the case for the use of ACID properties for content-oriented applications and semi-structured data.

You can do the same thing for resources (css, javascript, images, graphics) using a reverse proxy. The idea is that you should not keep threads loaded with the full blueprint of your installation for these tasks.

The way you use background delivery is similar to ns_returnfile, i.e.

ad_returnfile_background 200 [ns_guesstype ${filename}] ${filename}

Though, you need to make sure that you have tthread installed and the background delivery code that Gustaf wrote.

PS. The NaviServer project went the extra mile of serving requests by loading the procs dynamically --- only those required for a given request. My understanding is that the xorb package does something similar but at a higher level of abstraction.

about tclthreads: The package on TCL's file distribution area (on sf) is called thread-2.6.5 (not sure if that's what you mean). That package also includes ttrace, yes.

about ttrace: NaviServer has that integrated or makes use of it in order to provide tracing as an option. I haven't used that due to some problems that existed between that mechanism and XOTCL back when I tried (as soon as it was released). I remember sending you a message about that but I am not sure what's the current status.

about xorb: yes, I did not mean to imply that it is a replacement but it does serialize/deserialize code from a single thread and it also makes threads thinner, right? (just asking)

1. xotcl-core (sure, if it is defined there)
2. one needs either a "new" aolserver, or an "old" with the required patches (see discussion above and Boost...), and
3. one has to have libthread installed (tcl thread library, as described in the request-monitor wiki page)

Hope this helps -gustaf neumann

Your considerations are very helpful, as they always are. I can have now a more general view about threads X requests behavior. I'll try to make comments based on what you've posted.

- When I said there was a XoTcl problem, I was talking about how the destroy process can be painful depending on the OS + Hardware set. But as you said better, it's not like a XoTcl problem, is more like an AOLServer problem. I guess we agree here.

- I guess I could finally understand what the threads are meant to do. If you have a portion of memory that includes all the procs in the system that can be shared, I can see how 150 is a too large number. Thank you very much for this explanation. I was seeing in production an error that says that maxconnections is exceeded, even with machine resources available. Your explanation shows me that there where a lot of threads in queue waiting for a large download to finish,and background delivery could be a solution for that. I'll think about more testing on that and I'll give everybody a feedback about it.

- About use PostgreSQL and AOLServer in the same box, I've seen in this post here that you run in learn@wu the IBM logical partitions. Is that right? In that case you have no degradation and the system allows you to do everything in the same box without I/O issues. If you consider that a socket connection is quite faster than a TCP/IP one, it's probably a good idea to use the same box. Otherwise, I guess the split is a better option.

That's it. Thank you for the help.

Now I've got what you said. You see: IBM has an OS split mechanism called LPAR or logical partitions, as it's explained here. Using this feature is like if you have a VM, but without the software and hardware limitations that makes it impossible to split completely the I/O between all the machines you have. I thought that was the case for your production system, wich now you say it's not.

If you consider that a socket connection is quite faster than a TCP/IP connection, I can see that having both DB and AOLServer in the same box can be faster if you have enough available resources.

Concerning our tests, however, there's something showing up that can bring more issues to this matter. Linux Kernel has a parameter that sets the maximum amount of shared memory your applications can use in the system, wich is located at /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax. This parameter controls, for example, the amount of memory PostgreSQL can use in the shared buffers. In our test cases, we had the following set of parameters:

## AOLServer parameters
ns_section ns/threads
    ns_param   mutexmeter         true      ;# measure lock contention
    # The per-thread stack size must be a multiple of 8k for AOLServer to run under MacOS X
    ns_param   stacksize          [expr 1 * 8192 * 256]
ns_section ns/server/${server}
    ns_param   maxconnections     1000      ;# Max connections to put on queue
    ns_param   maxdropped         0
    ns_param   maxthreads         300      ;# Tune this to scale your server
    ns_param   minthreads         200       ;# Tune this to scale your server
    ns_param   threadtimeout      120      ;# Idle threads die at this rate
    ns_param   globalstats        false    ;# Enable built-in statistics
    ns_param   urlstats           true     ;# Enable URL statistics
    ns_param   maxurlstats        1000     ;# Max number of URL's to do stats on
ns_section ns/db/pool/pool1
#    ns_param   maxidle            0
#    ns_param   maxopen            0
    ns_param   connections        200
    ns_param   verbose            $debug
    ns_param   extendedtableinfo  true
    ns_param   logsqlerrors       $debug
    if { $database == "oracle" } {
        ns_param   driver             ora8
        ns_param   datasource         {}
        ns_param   user               $db_name
        ns_param   password           $db_password
    } else {
        ns_param   driver             postgres
        ns_param   datasource         ${db_host}:${db_port}:${db_name}
        ns_param   user               $db_user
        ns_param   password           ""
    }
ns_section ns/db/pool/pool2
#    ns_param   maxidle            0
#    ns_param   maxopen            0
    ns_param   connections        150
    ns_param   verbose            $debug
    ns_param   extendedtableinfo  true
    ns_param   logsqlerrors       $debug
    if { $database == "oracle" } {
        ns_param   driver             ora8
        ns_param   datasource         {}
        ns_param   user               $db_name
        ns_param   password           $db_password
    } else {
        ns_param   driver             postgres
        ns_param   datasource         ${db_host}:${db_port}:${db_name}
        ns_param   user               $db_user
        ns_param   password           ""
    }
ns_section ns/db/pool/pool3
#    ns_param   maxidle            0
#    ns_param   maxopen            0
    ns_param   connections        150
    ns_param   verbose            $debug
    ns_param   extendedtableinfo  true
    ns_param   logsqlerrors       $debug
    if { $database == "oracle" } {
        ns_param   driver             ora8
        ns_param   datasource         {}
        ns_param   user               $db_name
        ns_param   password           $db_password
    } else {
        ns_param   driver             postgres
        ns_param   datasource         ${db_host}:${db_port}:${db_name}
        ns_param   user               $db_user
        ns_param   password           ""
    }
## Kernel Parameters:
/proc/sys/kernel/shmall	2097152
/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax	2156978176
## PostgreSQL Parameters:
max_connections = 1000           # (change requires restart)
shared_buffers = 2000MB         # min 128kB or max_connections*16kB
work_mem = 1MB              # min 64kB
max_stack_depth = 5MB           # min 100kB

With these values, the memory was corrupted and caused the database to crash under the stress test, wich means that PostgreSQL process did shut down all connections and killed the postmaster process, making the server to show a message and don't shut down or come back.

With all the information I have now, I can see this was probably caused by the huge amount of threads I've put. The new threads where trying to get more and more memory, and the OS just couldn't give it. As both AOLServer and PostgreSQL where theoretically using the same memory area, it caused the DB to corrupt and to kill the process. If they where split in different servers maybe this wouldn't happen, and it made us think that different servers are always the best solution. No matter what you do wrong and what happens to the server, the AOLServer crash will not kill the DB process and DB will also not kill AOLServer too. This could be the safer choice for the case.