Hi Rafal,

On Apr 22, 2011, at 4:27 AM, Rafal Szczepanski wrote:

> Hi Chuck,
> 
> Thank you for your email. As I already told Kieran I couldn't answer before - 
> sorry for that. Please see my comments inline.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Chuck Hill <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Rafal,
> 
> On Mar 24, 2011, at 7:50 AM, Rafal Szczepanski wrote:
>>  
>> I would like to ask you about the optimal number of WorkerThreads 
>> (application settings: WOWorkerThreadCountMin & WOWorkerThreadCount).
> 
> That depends.  :-)  
> If someone says "that depends" I always start to fear :-)

Deployment tuning and optimization depends on so many variables that it is more 
an art than a science.


>  I would say that a min of 4 is reasonable and that max should not be high 
> enough to allow the instance to get backlogged with requests.  How many 
> instances are you running?  
> Well. We are running multiple applications on one server. The application 
> that is causing the problems consists of 4 instances.

That is reasonable.


>  
> Are they spread over multiple servers?
> Not at this moment.

If you have multiple app servers, distributing the instances over multiple 
servers is usually the best setup.


> `
>  Is concurrent request handling enabled?
> Yes. We needed to enable it because we are calling third party web services 
> and slow response was causing the whole application to freeze.

Having it enabled is good.  Calling slow third party webservices in the R-R 
loop is probably not the best plan.  If you are doing that, you may need to 
increases the listen queue size and max worker threads.  I would view that as a 
work-around, not a solution.


> 
>  How much heap space are you allocating to each instance?  
> Currently the instances are running with 1.5GB each.

That should be enough.  :-)


>  
> Are the app servers swapping?
> Nope. The sum of the memory assigned is less than the server's memory.
>  
> 
> 
>> One of the my applications is serving sometimes more than 2000 pages per 
>> hour.
>> The current setting is 16 WorkerThreads but I noticed that from time to time 
>> this number is not enough and the server is creating more WorkerThreads 
>> which is freezing for a while the application.
> 
> I think the more likely interpretation of this is that your app froze (was 
> slow to process requests), so it created more worker threads to record the 
> unprocessed requests waiting in line.  WorkerThreads are created in response 
> to slowness, creating them does not cause slowness.
> Well you're right - I have taken a look on one of the instances using 
> VisualVM. Usually there was one WorkerThread that was causing other 
> WorkerThreads to wait, hence when new requests were coming WebObjects was 
> creating additional ones.

Slow database access (lots of SQL statements, or slow queries) will cause this 
problem.


> 
> 
> 
>> Do you know if the number of WorkerThreads affects application’s 
>> performance? If not then perhaps I should start with 256 right from the 
>> beginning….
> 
> It does not affect performance directly, controls how many requests can be 
> queued up in an application before wotaskd considers it too full to send more 
> requests to.  Making more workerthreads just means that the app will queue up 
> more pending requests.  This is usually a Bad Thing (tm) as it will take so 
> long to process them and return a response that the user will click stop or 
> click the link again, thus using another worker thread and making things 
> worse.  Find out what is making the app slow and fix that.
> It seems that the problem was created by one page that was running a slow 
> query. As I have written before other WorkerThreads (which I assume wanted to 
> query the db) were waiting until the first query is finished. I have modified 
> the query so it runs faster and the situation improved significantly.

You could also create a different EOF stack which would give you a different 
database connection to run this slower query in.  That will not make it faster, 
but will eliminate the impact on the other requests.



>> I’ve got also another question do you know some real life examples of 
>> applications built in WebObjects that are serving huge number of 
>> requests/heavy load?
> 
> The iTunes music store is the classic example, as well as the Apple Store.  
> There are lots of others around that process a heavy load.  You just need to 
> optimize for your specific case.
> That's obviously a very promising example but I wonder how much of original 
> WebObjects is used there... :-)
> 

That may be a good point.  But they also have rather unique optimization 
requirements.  What do you consider a huge number of requests/heavy load?  
GVC.SiteMaker at the University of Michigan gets over 1 million unique visits a 
month and it is only partially optimized.  There is a guitar tabs site that was 
recently mentioned here that gets more than that.


Chuck

-- 
Chuck Hill             Senior Consultant / VP Development

Come to WOWODC this July for unparalleled WO learning opportunities and real 
peer to peer problem solving!  Network, socialize, and enjoy a great 
cosmopolitan city.  See you there!  http://www.wocommunity.org/wowodc11/

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