[ic] StartServers and RAM

[Grant]

>> I'm experimenting with different values for StartServers and I've
>> discovered that most of the resident memory associated with IC processes
>> seems to be shared.  'top' shows each of my processes have over 100M
>> resident memory and yet doubling or tripling the StartServers value barely
>> changes the -/+ buffers/cache values in 'free'.  I'm also using
>> MaxRequestsPerChild 100 and ChildLife 3600.
>>
>> Has anyone found a good method/formula for maximizing StartServers and
>> preventing OOM?  How much RAM should you have for StartServers 150 for
>> example?
>>
>> Is RAM the only consideration when tuning StartServers?
>
>
> RAM and CPU and workload (I/O or CPU bound?).
>
> A good rule of thumb would be to have maybe 2-5 Interchange child processes
> per CPU core. It's hard to see the use of more than that unless you have a
> heavily database-bound setup where many IC children need to be serving a
> request but wait around a lot not burning CPU. But if you're CPU-bound in
> Interchange and things get busy, they'll just be fighting against each other
> if you get too many at the same time.

Understood, thank you Jon.  Is there a good method or monitoring
program for figuring out the bottleneck?

- Grant