Well! The student servers have enough data behind them that I can REALLY stress-test the web-implementation. And things aren't behaving correctly. Twice now I've run the stress-test-of-doom at it (details below) and the server has gone weird. In one case it started serving up traffic really slowly, then started cropping errors about non-existent .htaccess files before going catatonic. The second time response-time sucked for a while but eventually returned to normal.
So. What is causing that? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect something in the dynamic thread handling. One of the nicer features of Apache2 is that it is able to handle resources dynamically, so I don't have to allocate 150 threads up front. I am now able to set low and high water-marks and it'll allocate (and de-allocate) threads as needed. I'm not so sure They have the bugs worked out, but I need to do some testing.
Stress-test-of-doom
A while back, I took a couple days of logfiles from the student-servers and parsed 'em. The stress-test tool is called hammerhead off of the Phlak security ISO-linux distro. Some scripting later, and I have a bucket (980!) of scenario-files of requests that were at one time legitimate. This gave me a good base to try to stress servers with. Hammerhead allows the configuration of how many simultaneous users to simulate and how fast they hit their next site. This allowed me to get downright slashdotty. A couple (less than 5) scenario files are no longer good, which just goes to show the static nature of these kinds of web-pages.
So. What is causing that? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect something in the dynamic thread handling. One of the nicer features of Apache2 is that it is able to handle resources dynamically, so I don't have to allocate 150 threads up front. I am now able to set low and high water-marks and it'll allocate (and de-allocate) threads as needed. I'm not so sure They have the bugs worked out, but I need to do some testing.
Stress-test-of-doom
A while back, I took a couple days of logfiles from the student-servers and parsed 'em. The stress-test tool is called hammerhead off of the Phlak security ISO-linux distro. Some scripting later, and I have a bucket (980!) of scenario-files of requests that were at one time legitimate. This gave me a good base to try to stress servers with. Hammerhead allows the configuration of how many simultaneous users to simulate and how fast they hit their next site. This allowed me to get downright slashdotty. A couple (less than 5) scenario files are no longer good, which just goes to show the static nature of these kinds of web-pages.
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This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.