Dear all,

Our experience with moving to DSpace 7.6 in production was that bots 
exhausted the SSR cache immediately. We effectively solved it by adding 
rate limiting of bots in nginx.

I also noticed that many applications have had performance issues with 
Angular SSR due to its use of `inlineCriticalCss`. See some discussions:

- https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/42098
- https://github.com/angular/universal/issues/2106
- https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters/issues/78

On that note there is a draft pull request for dspace-angular to allow 
disabling inlineCriticalCss: 
https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/2067

Regards,

On Wednesday, March 6, 2024 at 10:47:31 PM UTC+3 DSpace Technical Support 
wrote:

Hi all,

I wanted to chime in briefly to say that I appreciate everyone sharing your 
experiences with high CPU issues, as it does help the developers & I to 
hear what everyone is encountering under heavier load and/or bot activity.  
 The more that institutions can share your experiences, the more likely we 
can begin to narrow down the problem(s) and build better 
documentation/guidelines for everyone.

A few things that are clear is that Server Side Rendering (SSR) from 
Angular **does seem to be more CPU heavy than we anticipated**.  This is 
why the basic "SSR caching 
<https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/Performance+Tuning+DSpace#PerformanceTuningDSpace-Turnon(orincrease)cachingofServer-SideRenderedpages>"
 
was added in the first place.  However, what's also starting to become 
clear is that the *basic SSR caching* may not be enough.  (In all honesty, 
we knew it would help in some scenarios but possibly not *all* scenarios.)

I can verify though that the existing basic SSR caching is *per instance*.  
So, when using "cluster mode" (and running several instances at once), 
there is no way to currently share that cache across instances (as the 
cache is literally just stored in the memory of each instance).  This means 
it has a more limited impact than we initially hoped.  

*This may mean we need to begin looking at some more advanced caching 
options for Angular SSR*. To be clear though,  this SSR performance/caching 
issue shouldn't be specific to DSpace 7, as we are just using the SSR tools 
from Angular.io. So, it's possible that tools may already exist out there 
from other sites/applications that use Angular SSR.

In the meantime, I would ask that sites which have this working well 
consider also sharing your experiences of how you "stabilized" your high 
CPU. I know there are sites out there who've done this (as there are a 
growing number of sites running DSpace 7 in production).  It'd just be 
helpful, for me (and others), if we can learn from each other in order to 
create better documentation & best practices for DSpace 7.  (All DSpace 
documentation & best practices have always been a collaborative/community 
effort because we don't have a central development team.)

Tim

On Wednesday, March 6, 2024 at 10:38:43 AM UTC-6 uOttawa Library wrote:

I would like to understand how memory is used by the node instances.

There are comments in the example frontend configuration file that mentions 
the following:

      # Maximum number of pages to cache for known bots. Set to zero (0) to 
disable server side caching for bots.
      # Default is 1000, which means the 1000 most recently accessed public 
pages will be cached.
      # As all pages are cached in server memory, increasing this value 
will increase memory needs.
      # Individual cached pages are usually small (<100KB), so max=1000 
should only require ~100MB of memory.

We have both bot cache and anonymous cache set to  max: 1000. This would 
mean a total of ~200MB cache (per instance?). We allocate 1.5GB to 
instances (max_memory_restart), so cache wouldn't be the main cause of the 
high memory usage. We have set max_old_space_size=1024 since the original 
post above, and this seems to make the instances stay alive longer 
(instance restart every ~90 min due to exceeding the 1.5GB memory).

It isn't clear is if cache is shared amongst instances (to avoid having to 
render the same frequently accessed content in every instance), but in any 
case, it wouldn't be the main source of memory use according to the 
comments.

François

On Tuesday, March 5, 2024 at 5:13:09 p.m. UTC-5 Edmund Balnaves wrote:

We are running DSpace 7 instances in a multi-tennanted environment in a 
reasonably stable way.

Our experience is that lots of memory is needed and we do see lockups in 
cluster instances periodically.   Even low levels of bot activity can 
stress the system and performance of DSpace7 is pretty under-whelming but 
we have managed to maintain stable instances.     Trimming your caching 
would be wise to keep memory within reasonable bounds.  We have written 
shell scripts to monitor and restart instances that look to be locked up, 
and have put some memory limits for auto-restart per your approach.


Edmund Balnaves
Prosentient Systems


On Tuesday, March 5, 2024 at 10:22:23 PM UTC+11 Majo wrote:

Hello Carolyn Sullivan.

I would like to offer a few points I noticed. I was responsible for 
deploying
one instance of DSpace and I am quite familiar with problems you described.
However I am no expert, so take all of the following with a grain of salt
(and perhaps a bit of hope that someone more experienced will also reply).

First of all, the resources you have available are by far not enough. 
The instance we deployed was small and we are using *15 CPUs and 30GB of 
RAM*.
Initially we had about your specs and I couldn't make it work reliably, no 
matter what I did.
(Limiting bots helped a great deal, but that is certainly not ideal and the 
performance was still terrible).

Secondly, the caching. By trial and error, I arrived to 20 sites for
bots and 100 sites for anonymous users. When it was significantly higher, 
each core used a lot
of memory and therefore kept restarting, losing all benefit of cache. I 
suggest you try to observe
how much memory your individual cores consume and if it is too much, 
decrease the cache.
My conclusion is, that you do not need exceeding amounts of caching, 
because yes,
it will consume too much memory and if it causes swapping, it will only 
slow everything
down. I was slightly surprised with the settings that work for us, but they 
are effective,
when used together with more CPU and RAM resources.

I consider the points above the most important, but what is also peculiar 
is your setting
max_memory_restart = 1500M. Why have 4096MB of memory for each core, if you 
restart
it at 1500M? We only use the max_old_spaces_size argument. I am not sure, 
but I would
either remove the restart argument, or increase it to match 
max_old_space_size.

We also have the "1 rules skipped due to selector errors" constantly, but
it doesn't appear to be a limiting factor. I would be happy if it were 
resolved, however.

Perhaps last note, the angular frontend with SSR on consumes a lot of 
resources.
Apparently much more than it previously did, so no matter the settings, you 
will
have to up the CPU and RAM. It could also resolve the proxy timeouts.
Our cores (before I tuned the settings) were so overwhelmed, we frequently
got 504 ERROR (We have the angular behind reverse proxy.. it did not manage 
to
load within 45 or 50 second limit).

I wish you a lot of luck as I am afraid you will need it.

Best regards,
Majo

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 11:30 AM Carolyn Sullivan <[email protected]> 
wrote:

Hello all,

As you might have seen if you frequent the Technical Support channel in the 
DSpace Slack 
<https://dspace-org.slack.com/archives/C3V628QNN/p1709318454084069>, we've 
been encountering high CPU usage in DSpace 7.6 leading to decreased 
performance (ie. site unavailability) and we've been having a lot of 
errors.  We're not entirely sure which errors may be the significant ones 
relating to our performance challenges, and would welcome any input from 
the community to help us improve our site issues.  Also, if you're 
encountering similar issues, please do let us know--maybe we're all having 
the same problems and can solve these collaboratively.  Thanks already to 
Tim Donoghue and Mark Wood for their suggestions in the DSpace Slack!  I've 
aggregated the responses we've already received on these issues here to 
enable us to keep track of suggestions.

So, a summary of our issues:  We've set up our server following best 
practices in the Performance Tuning documentation 
<https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/Performance+Tuning+DSpace>.  We 
run everything on a single server with 4 CPU and 12 GB of RAM, which was 
the configuration that worked for our previous version of DSpace (6.3).  
Initially, we had pm2 configured in cluster mode with max instances and 
max_memory_restart: 500M. With this configuration, the node instances kept 
restarting ~every minute and seemed to be monopolizing the CPUs, and 
starving the other components.  Since then, we have since tuned it down to 
3 instances, ie:

{
    "apps": [
        {
           "name": "dspace-ui",
           "cwd": "/var/dspace-frontend/",
           "script": "dist/server/main.js",
           "instances": "3",
           "exec_mode": "cluster",
           "timestamp": "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm Z",
           "out_file": "log/dspace-ui.log",
           "error_file": "log/dspace-ui_error.log",
           "merge_logs": true,
           "env": {
              "NODE_ENV": "production",
              "NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS": "/etc/ssl/certs/rootCA2.crt"
           },
           "max_memory_restart": "1500M",
           "node_args": "--max_old_space_size=4096"
        }
    ]
}

A review of process with top shows very active node instances despite low 
traffic (~ 1 request/second):

Tasks: 289 total,   5 running, 284 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 93.9 us,  3.0 sy,  0.0 ni,  3.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si, 
 0.0 st
MiB Mem :  11965.2 total,    440.4 free,  10901.1 used,    623.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.    613.9 avail Mem
    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ 
COMMAND
1504803 dspace    20   0 2328180   1.5g  13936 R 100.0  12.5  10:53.08 node 
/v+
1506783 dspace    20   0 2620092   1.7g  14024 R  93.8  14.8   9:44.49 node 
/v+
1506913 dspace    20   0 1383380 586472  14180 R  93.8   4.8   4:57.11 node 
/v+
1508040 dspace    20   0  733380 141452  36952 R  75.0   1.2   0:00.77 node 
/v+
    781 root      20   0  237020   2536    944 S   6.2   0.0   9:41.79 
vmtoolsd
      1 root      20   0  171488   7176   2492 S   0.0   0.1   0:44.04 
systemd

Our cache settings are set as follows:
# Caching settings
cache:
...
  serverSide:
    debug: false
    botCache:
      max: 1000
      timeToLive: 86400000 # 1 day
      allowStale: true
    anonymousCache:
      max: 1000
      timeToLive: 10000 # 10 seconds
      allowStale: true

*The main question of our systems analyst (Francois Malric): Is this level 
of constantly high CPU usage is normal due to node.js?  Or is it likely 
that our DSpace is displaying poor performance due to underlying issues?*

Here are some examples of the errors we've seen:

(1) From our DSpace Logs:  According to this, we don't have that much 
traffic (HTTP 0.96 requests/minute), which would likely be higher if bot 
traffic was the issue.  Nota bene, our pm2 monitor likely has a bug as it's 
showing the units as req/min; should be req/sec.

lq Process List qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqklqq  dspace-ui Logs 
 qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqk
x[ 1] dspace-ui     Mem: 824 MB     xx dspace-ui > The response for '
https://ruor.uottawa.ca/server/api/core/items/d2d3c  x
x[ 2] dspace-ui     Mem: 316 MB     xx dspace-ui > 1 rules skipped due to 
selector errors:                                x
x[ 3] dspace-ui     Mem: 777 MB     xx dspace-ui >   
.custom-file-input:lang(en)~.custom-file-label -> unmatched          x
x[ 0] pm2-logrotate       Mem:  45  xx dspace-ui > GET 
/handle/10393/19705/simple-search?query=&sort_by=score&order=desc  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > *1 rules skipped due to 
selector errors:  *                              x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >   
*.custom-file-input:lang(en)~.custom-file-label 
-> unmatched*          x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > Redirecting from 
/bitstreams/e524c49e-5fc2-4e74-b69d-0c890238ab3b/dow  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > GET 
/bitstreams/e524c49e-5fc2-4e74-b69d-0c890238ab3b/download 302      x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >* ERROR Error: Cannot set 
headers after they are sent to the client      x*
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at new NodeError 
(node:internal/errors:405:5)                      x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
ServerResponse.setHeader (node:_http_outgoing:648:11)           x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
ServerResponseService.setHeader (/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/ser  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at Object.next 
(/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/server/9366.js:1:4722)   x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
ConsumerObserver2.next (/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/server/main.  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
SafeSubscriber2.Subscriber2._next (/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/s  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
SafeSubscriber2.Subscriber2.next (/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/se  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/server/main.js:1:4471483              x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
OperatorSubscriber2._this._next (/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/ser  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >     at 
OperatorSubscriber2.Subscriber2.next (/opt/dspace-frontend/dis  x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >   code: '
*ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT*'                                        x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > }                       
                                               x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > 1 rules skipped due to 
selector errors:                                x
x                                   xx dspace-ui >   
.custom-file-input:lang(en)~.custom-file-label -> unmatched          x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > Warning 
[ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT]: *Tried to set headers after they *      x
x                                   xx dspace-ui > GET 
/items/d2d3cc05-419a-488e-912e-1ff20ab7a654 200 3281.694 ms - -    x
mqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqjmqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqj
lq Custom Metrics qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqklq Metadata 
qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqk
x Heap Size             709.14 MiB  xx App Name              dspace-ui     
                                               x
x Event Loop Latency p95            xx Namespace             default       
                                               x
x Event Loop Latency      34.32 ms  xx Version               N/A           
                                               x
x Active handles                10  xx Restarts              38             
                                              x
x Active requests                1  xx Uptime                5m             
                                              x
x HTTP                0.96 req/min  xx Script path           
/opt/dspace-frontend/dist/server/main.js                     x
x HTTP P95 Latency         4009 ms  xx Script args           N/A           
                                               x
x HTTP Mean Latency         868 ms  xx Interpreter           node           
                                              x

We'd particularly appreciate feedback on the error messages (bolded above):

   - 1 rules skipped due to selector errors:
      - *Suggestion from Mark Wood: this is probably because we're using 
      Bootstrap 4  
      
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67581454/receiving-unmatched-pseudo-class-lang-after-updating-angular>*
   - .custom-file-input:lang(en)~.custom-file-label -> unmatched
   - ERROR Error: Cannot set headers after they are sent to the client
   - Warning [ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT]: Tried to set headers after they
      - *Suggestion from Mark Wood: * *The Headers Sent errors seem  to be 
      mostly an annoyance, but the constant dumping of stack traces is bloating 
      the log.*
   
These errors occur constantly :'(

*Suggestion from Mark Wood on error messages: The most serious is probably 
the proxy errors.  It appears that PM2 is closing proxy connections, 
probably because there are too many.  The machine is simply being asked to 
do more work than it can handle in the available time.  We see this too, 
even after doubling our CPU and memory from levels that were quite adequate 
for v6.  We are about to throw a big increase in resources at v7 to see if 
that helps, as it has at other sites.*

(2) Example of errors from our Apache Error Log (we run Apache to proxy, as 
recommended in documentation):

[Fri Mar 01 14:51:00.740446 2024] [proxy:error] [pid 1494894:tid 
140510257739520] [client 66.XXX.75.XXX:0] AH00898: Error reading from 
remote server returned by /handle/10393/19705/simple-search
[Fri Mar 01 14:53:26.192799 2024] [proxy_http:error] [pid 1494894:tid 
140510257739520] (104)Connection reset by peer: [client 66.XXX.75.XXX:0] 
AH01102: error reading status line from remote server localhost:4000

Some suggestions we've seen in the DSpace Slack already:
Tim Donoghue:

   - Initial increased bot traffic is common, but tends to decrease over 
   time
   - Review major errors in DSpace/Tomcat/Postgres/etc. logs
   - Enable more caching in server-side rendering as that uses the most CPU 
   in Node.js
      - Seconded by Mark Wood: Increasing the caching will likely reduce 
      the CPU demand but memory demand will increase drastically.
   - Mark Wood: In general, DSpace 7.x is much more computationally 
   expensive than the previous versions

If you've read this far, thank you so much for your time and 
consideration.  The wider DSpace community seems to be struggling with 
these issues, and we would all welcome your observations on these issues 
and suggestions for resolving it.

Best,
Carolyn Sullivan

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