On 29 October 2012 23:56, Dave Humphrey <[email protected]> wrote:

> As a rough guess at what to set MaxClients to use "top" and look at the
> difference between the RES and SHR columns of all httpd processes. I
> believe this is roughly the amount of non-shared memory each of the child
> Apache processes are using (for example, I'm averaging 10 MB per process).
> Take the maximum amount of RAM you want Apache to use and divide it by this
> memory to get a rough number for MaxClients. You can monitor memory usage
> and adjust this as needed or through load testing.


I just set MaxClients 50 (on the basis of fat apache2 processes having
~50MB discrepancy between RES and SHR). Let's see what happens.


> Of course, this is a solution to the usage of swap and not the actual issue
> you are having. I would continue to look at what is causing the surge in
> requests. Is it a DoS of some sort (either accidental or on purpose) or is
> some part of the server stalling which is causing requests to pile up and
> overflow? For example, if the database is having an issue (a bunch of long
> queries) then all Apache requests will start piling up until you hit swap
> or the database issue resolves itself.


I see that in busy times, the CPU usage goes way up and a chunk of it
is MySQL. I could be wrong, but this suggests to me complex requests
to MediaWiki (e.g. logged in editors right-clicking diffs on an
obscure page). I should probably profile MediaWiki, given we have a
pile of custom extensions.


> Along these lines I would suggest some sort of monitoring/logging service
> like Zabbix or Nagois (to name just two, there are many similar options to
> choose from). This helps you on two fronts: 1) Logging of Parameters and 2)


I live on our Munin graphs :-)


- d.

_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Reply via email to