Posted by Chuck Vose
Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:59:00 GMT
Regular life post disclaimer
All apologies for a regular life post, for those that don’t know this blog can be sorted by category and the auto-rss feeds actually do work to separate by category. So my promise is that the tags Life and Programming will be stuck to religiously. If you only want to read programming related topics, and I suspect that is the case for most of you, this is the link to do so. Like any good Rails app that link works perfectly for both RSS readers and human readers.
Living guilt-free with a woman who is driven
I live with, and am hopelessly in love with, a woman who on the absolute worst days could be described merely as ‘driven’. Those of you that know her know that this word ‘driven’ pales in comparison to the actual manifestation that is my very-soon-to-be wife. At any given time she is volunteering, working a full time job, going to school or doing another volunteer position, planning a wedding, moving all our stuff from one house to another in her car instead of a truck, and making handwarmers or clothing for our cats. She is an amazing woman and I think this quote from a close friend of ours sums it up nicely: “How does it feel for everything you touch to turn into awesome?”
I on the other hand, work a job. Granted, it’s a hard job that requires lots of strenuous thinking from my ergonomic chair in a temperature controlled environment where everyone is required by corporate mandate to leave me alone, but well, actually I’ve lost my train of thought. Oh yeah, I don’t do half the stuff she does; I think I would be lucky to consider myself as doing a tenth of the incredible things she does. I merely fill a role in her life which is to be unendingly supportive and encourage her to stop working on occasion through any of a variety of methods including tickling or telling myself jokes and giggling.
The last piece of this pending nuptial catastrophe is thus: I was raised, either by my parents or my college roommates, to feel unbearable guilt and shame if someone in the house is working and I’m playing video games. There are a lot of roots here but I don’t think they bear analyzing at the moment.
Work budgeting (Conclusion)
Luckily, in addition to being ‘driven’, my beautiful love is also a complete and utter genius. I write this document to later remind me of how wonderfully smart she is (and because my memory is about 3 minutes long). How does one strike a balance when one partner relaxes by doing things, and one partner relaxes by doing nothing? Surely, even the slightest analysis suggests that this is going to end in tears when I feel guilty or she feels put-upon or under appreciated. It has, but as with all things she has come up with the following method:
We have created a chore budget. We are both required to do a small amount of chores and after that point, if she feels like continuing to work I am absolutely not allowed to feel guilty and she can feel free to derive all sorts of satisfaction from finishing things and checking them off her mental checklist. Now I know that there is an end in sight, after my chores are done I no longer get to feel guilty (she actually got mad at me and made me play video games instead of continuing folding laundry tonight).
I know that I’m not alone in the world, so if you find this blog by some happenstance and you’ve had a similar situation please let me know. Links containing various sexual enhancement drugs will probably not be accepted but it’s worth trying, I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone, especially robots.
Posted in Life | Tags compromise, Life, marriage | 5 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:48:00 GMT
Cross posted at the Metal Toad Blog
I was trolling around the Internet today looking for benchmarks and I actually had a little trouble finding something current. Dries has one comparing D6 on PHP4 vs D6 on PHP5 but that was clearly ages ago. I also realize that this is going to be out of style in about 12 minutes, will probably be fraught with contention, and generally mocked by everyone; but in the interest of those few souls out there that really actually just want to know what is reasonable to expect from production hardware under some load I want to post these stats anyways.
Our setup
We’re using a gaggle of 1U SuperServers by Super Micro. The basic stats are here. We have them loaded with a pair of 4-core opterons and 32GB of RAM. Not entirely unaffordable nowadays for production kit.
These sit behind some firewalls and an F5 load balancer which helps make SSL a little quicker and makes sure that if things go down we can fail over to a different webhead. The truth is that all this redundancy stuff up front actually slows our pages down pretty heavily for small loads but when doing a lot of traffic on those happy spikey days it helps out a lot.
We’ve done a lot of the normal things to speed up the servers:
- Turn on APC, this is huge!
- Get rid of your .htaccess files and configure apache to do this at restart
- Use Boost if you can’t run Varnish, but run Varnish wherever you can
- Turn off all the devel modules
- Turn on as many of your drupal caching options as you can without breaking the site. Then figure out why the site broke and try to get those breaking caches online
- Turn on your MySQL Query Cache, it’s off by default and makes an amazing difference
- Put MySQL on its own disk, put logs and even the MySQL binlogs on a different disk if you can
- MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH! Getting capped by your ISP will kill you during spikes since your servers will be resending lost data constantly
Commands Used
Since this article is about ab I’m not going to post our configs from SIEGE or JMeter.
Running from a box with an extremely fast network connection we were doing the following:
ab -n 10000 -c 100 -k -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' www.site-name.tld/
I like to run from a box within the network directly to the webhead as well to find out how much things are getting slowed down in the load balancers and firewalls. Since our webheads often do more than one site we have to use a Host header and the actual IP address as shown in the following snippet.
ab -n 10000 -c 100 -k -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' -H 'Host: www.site-name.tld' 192.168.0.27/
I also like to use relatively high concurrency and number of requests so that momentary spikes even out a little bit. There is a rule out on the net that you should take the average of three attempts for any benchmark and I think that’s totally necessary.
We’ve noticed that our servers start to really crack around 500 concurrent anonymous users. Peak performance seems to be around 100-200 so I stick with that so that the differences in config changes are the most obvious. If I go from 100 #/s to 250 #/s I know it’s a big change (or vice versa in a lot of cases).
Results
Without further ado, these are my results. I realize that there is certainly more that we should be doing to squeeze out performance and I also realize that my methods are pretty unscientific but I hope they give you an idea of what you might be looking for.
Internal – Test 1
Document Path: /
Document Length: 10716 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 40.694054 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 9993
(Connect: 0, Length: 9993, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 112128752 bytes
HTML transferred: 106842680 bytes
Requests per second: 245.74 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 406.941 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.069 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 2690.81 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 2 84.8 0 2999
Processing: 61 379 809.9 147 12255
Waiting: 53 344 799.4 134 12255
Total: 61 381 814.4 148 12259
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 148
66% 170
75% 265
80% 345
90% 599
95% 1371
98% 3159
99% 4725
100% 12259 (longest request)
Internal – Test 2
Document Path: /
Document Length: 10683 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 29.175060 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 5389
(Connect: 0, Length: 5389, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 111006011 bytes
HTML transferred: 105724371 bytes
Requests per second: 342.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 291.751 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.918 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3715.64 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 5 123.8 0 3033
Processing: 41 273 445.8 135 11841
Waiting: 36 245 430.6 124 11840
Total: 41 278 463.5 136 11851
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 136
66% 150
75% 176
80% 287
90% 491
95% 1305
98% 1534
99% 3118
100% 11851 (longest request)
External – Test 1
Document Path: /
Document Length: 10472 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 31.161653 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 110620000 bytes
HTML transferred: 104720000 bytes
Requests per second: 320.91 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 311.617 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3.116 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3466.66 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 13 199.5 0 3051
Processing: 46 273 414.5 138 4558
Waiting: 41 246 404.3 126 4545
Total: 46 287 457.2 139 4558
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 139
66% 156
75% 299
80% 336
90% 482
95% 1119
98% 1580
99% 3143
100% 4558 (longest request)
External – Test 2
Document Path: /
Document Length: 10472 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 29.336590 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 110000000 bytes
HTML transferred: 104720000 bytes
Requests per second: 340.87 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 293.366 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.934 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3661.67 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 3 95.1 0 3034
Processing: 50 264 447.7 129 4532
Waiting: 45 240 435.7 119 4528
Total: 50 268 459.6 129 6128
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 129
66% 143
75% 162
80% 295
90% 423
95% 1307
98% 1532
99% 3125
100% 6128 (longest request)
Posted in Drupal, Programming | Tags ab, benchmark, drupal | 5 comments
