my instance's performance.

[Elliott A. Johnson]

Hi,

I've been running load tests on my perlbal 1.70 instance and I was wondering if others have been getting similar results as me or if there are some tweaks that I should be doing?

Currently I have a perlbal instance (with XS headers activated) connected to a single backend node running thttpd.  Both machines have 2 dual core, 3.6Ghz Xeons with 8gigs of ram (dell blades) and are running linux with a 2.6.24 kernel.

I've used httperf to test direct connections to the backend server.  Testing from 3 similar hosts on the same subnet as the webserver it can sustain several thousand connections per second and each connection fetches a static 12k css file.

I'm performing the same tests on the perlbal frontend from same subnet it's on and here are my results:

  conn/sec    cpu usage*      tx traffic   avg replies/sec    concurrent conns
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        10        0-20%        280k/sec              10.0                   2
       100        0-70%       2820k/sec             100.0                   3
       200        0-80%       5630k/sec             200.0                   6
       300      20-100%       8440k/sec             300.0                  11
       400      80-100%         11M/sec             271.4                1022

  * cpu usage is the % usage on a single core out of 4.

All tests finish successfully except on the 400 connections per second test, which always has several hundred fd-unavailable errors.  There are also a huge number of concurrent connections, so it seems that connections are formed, but never finish and they pile up until the the test machine runs out of available file descriptors.  Correct me if I'm wrong here.

I was wondering if the 400 concurrent connection limit I'm seeing lines up with what others have experienced or if thttpd and perlbal aren't playing well together.  Here is an example of my config:

LOAD stats
xs enable headers
SERVER aio_mode    = ioaio
SERVER aio_threads = 10

CREATE POOL http_static_servers
  POOL http_static_servers ADD 10.10.10.10:80

CREATE SERVICE http_static_balancer
  SET listen          = 69.69.69.69:80
  SET role            = reverse_proxy
  SET pool            = http_static_servers
  SET plugins         = stats
  SET persist_client  = on
  SET persist_backend = on
  SET verify_backend  = on
  SET verify_backend_path = /ping
ENABLE http_static_balancer

CREATE SERVICE mgmt
  SET role   = management
  SET listen = 127.0.0.1:60000
ENABLE mgmt

Are there any options I should think about including in my linux kernel config or anything under /proc that I should consider tweaking to help perlbal use less cpu and serve more connections per second?

elliott