I think I lean towards Anthony's side. I'd have to check what we set ours to, 
but we aim to have requests served under 5sec. Long running requests are 
outside the norm. I would think the default could be low and if a portlet is 
known to need more, it could be changed accordingly.

That said, an administrator should generally review them before moving into 
production so maybe the default is not as important.

JimH

-------- Original message --------
From: Anthony Colebourne <[email protected]> 
Date: 08/28/2013  15:26  (GMT-06:00) 
To: [email protected] 
Cc: James Wennmacher <[email protected]> 
Subject: Re: [uportal-dev] Proposal to change portal's default render timeout 
from 5000ms to 20000ms 
 
Hi James,

In my experience I would recommend extreme caution when raising portlet 
timeouts.

Under heavy load, it is very easy to use up all the portlet rendering 
threads.

Just this morning I accidentally mis-configured a portlet who's time out 
is 10000 and brought down our servers. We're pretty strict about timeout 
values and almost all of our portlets use the 5s default.

We in many cases use ajax to load content from long-running processes. 
I'm some of these cases I have reluctantly raised to timeout of the 
resource requests only.

I would like to see documented the relationship between rendering 
threads and timeout values, also how this relates to tomcat threads and 
apache threads where applicable. (I guess db connection pools are also 
impacted, both portal and portlet?).

Some guidance on how to choose sensible thread/timeout values based on 
averages such as portlets per page / server resources would be useful.

I'm happy to provide information and statistics from our production 
cluster if it helps?

-- Anthony.



On 28/08/13 20:08, James Wennmacher wrote:
> I propose we change the portal's default render timeout from 5000ms to
> 20000ms.  There are portlets that tend to take long time (such as email
> preview) or custom portlets connecting to back end systems where 5000ms
> is sometimes too short a time.
>
> I think the user experience in general would be better to have a longer
> default so:
> - The portal doesn't display an unpleasant message to the user for
> longer-running scenarios
> - The portal is more tolerant of operational issues such as uPortal or
> dependent systems running a bit slow
> - Longer-running processes should typically use ajax requests to obtain
> the data for a better user experience, so the urgent user response is
> less important in these situations since the entire UI is not impacted
>
> This would affect new portlets that are created via the UI (or imported
> without a timeout value I believe) but not existing portlet instances.
>
> Thoughts?

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