[ic] Most Common Performance Issues

interchange-users@icdevgroup.org interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Mon Aug 26 12:49:01 2002


On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 12:15:45PM -0400, Michael Stearne wrote:
>  cfm@maine.com wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 03:57:14PM -0700, Barry Treahy, Jr. wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>Michael Stearne wrote:
> >>
> >>   
> >>
> >>>Our site is running IC on a DP 800Mhz Redhat box with 512MB of RAM 
> >>>with SCSI disk.  This machine runs only IC.  The site is based off of 
> >>>the foundation sample site and contains about 300 product using the 
> >>>standard (non-RDBMS) database.  We have seen decreasing performance 
> >>>over the last 6 months the site has been up.  There is up to 4 IC 
> >>>processes running at a time because of traffic.  Each page on the site 
> >>>takes from 2-10 secs to generate.  This is across all platforms and 
> >>>browsers at LAN speed. If an IC process has the machine to itself 
> >>>(only 1 user on the site), that process will take 97% of the CPU.  
> >>>While this is understandable, even when there is 1 process, it still 
> >>>takes ~4 seconds to generate a page.  I don't know how a machine as 
> >>>powerful can get floored by 4 concurrent users.
> >>>
> >>>Currently we run expireall each day.  This seems to help a little.
> >>>
> >>>What else could I do (configuration, cron, etc) to work on performance? 
> >>>     
> >>>
> >
> >I'd suggest you get someone with sysadmin experience to look at it
> >first.  You say **only** IC.  Do you mean **only** IC PLUS
> >apache+mod_ssl+ whatever, etc...?
> > 
> >
> I am the sysadmin.  Apache has never been the one to bog down a machine 
> for me.  There are many things running, but the process that slows the 
> machine is interchange.  That's why I mentioned that.  And by only 
> Interchange, I meant no Oracle, J2EE, etc that could be labor intensive.  
> 
> >What does top tell you?  yadda yadda.
> > 
> >
> 11:48am  up 29 days, 11:04,  2 users,  load average: 3.17, 1.64, 0.95
> 93 processes: 82 sleeping, 11 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states: 93.0% user,  6.9% system,  0.0% nice,  0.0% idle
> Mem:   512780K av,  501716K used,   11064K free,      64K shrd,   97904K 
> buff
> Swap:  506036K av,   30604K used,  475432K free                  219388K 
> cached
> 
>  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
> 2872 interch   20   0 22432  21M 15220 R    10.9  4.3   0:07 interchange
> 2887 interch   14   0 23008  22M 16216 R    10.7  4.4   0:02 interchange
> 2889 interch   14   0 22900  22M 16232 R    10.7  4.4   0:02 interchange
> 2891 interch   14   0 22904  22M 16232 R    10.7  4.4   0:02 interchange
> 2893 interch   14   0 22920  22M 16232 R    10.7  4.4   0:01 interchange
> 2895 interch   14   0 22976  22M 16232 R    10.7  4.4   0:01 interchange
> 2898 interch   14   0 21324  20M 15812 R    10.7  4.1   0:01 interchange
> 2904 interch   14   0 22812  22M 14996 R     9.5  4.4   0:00 interchange
> 2907 interch   14   0 21732  21M 15800 R     9.5  4.2   0:00 interchange
> 2821 interch   11   0  1092 1092   836 R     0.5  0.2   0:00 top
>    1 root       8   0   496  460   428 S     0.0  0.0   0:34 init
>    2 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
>    3 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kapm-idled
>    4 root      19  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
>    5 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   1:27 kswapd
>    6 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kreclaimd
>    7 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 bdflush
>    8 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:02 kupdated
>    9 root      -1 -20     0    0     0 SW<   0.0  0.0   0:00 mdrecoveryd
>  453 root       9   0   576  560   516 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 syslogd
>  458 root       9   0   944  292   292 S     0.0  0.0   0:00 klogd
> 
> >Nor do you say if you are making 15 thousand sales a day or 15.  How
> >many pages a day are you serving?
> >
> > 
> >
> Well, because of the performance issues we are serving less pages than 
> we would like to.  But there are about 20-30 orders a day.  With ssl 
> used only for the order pages.
> 

hmmmm, I'll trade you a 486 with 64MB ram that could handle many more
orders than that a day.  :-)  But seriously, ic is only showing that
something is very wrong.  More the symptom than the problem, but there
may also be a snowball effect.

I still don't buy the "only interchange" when top says 93 processes and
you are 30M into swap with half a gig of ram.  There is some sort of
contention going on, SCSI bus timeouts, something very evil.


-- 

Christopher F. Miller, Publisher                               cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc           208 Portland Road, Gray, ME  04039
1.207.657.5078                                         http://www.maine.com/
Content/site management, online commerce, internet integration, Debian linux