[AOLSERVER] maxrun setting in aol4.5.1

[Majid Khan]

Hi All,

I am done with the basic understanding of the configuration of aol4.5.1 and I have set the following variable for my configuration. Since we have full openACS files with alot of customization and too much additional TCL files so I have set the connecitons per threads 1000 and after that it will destroy which to me initially looks good enough though I didn't go live but I am planning to go with that. I was just confused on one of the parameter that is maxruns which I read is that it is the concurrent connection to the server and I found one of the example where they set maxruns=maxthreads so my question is should I do the same thing doesn't it mean that it will just accept 40 concurrent connections in my case? however we have a very busy site and we don't want that it should be just limited to 40 so I am planing to set it to 500 please correct me if my understanding is incorrect also suggest me if there is anything which needs to be tuned more in my below settings.

set max_threads 40
set max_conns 1000 ;# or ConnsPerThread, i.e. after how many requests processed by a given thread should it be destroyed, 0 means never.
set min_threads 5
set thread_timeout 120 ;# destroy an idle thread after this many idle seconds
set max_busy_threads 10
set max_wait 100 ;# max number of threads waiting to be serviced
set max_wait_time 120 ;# seconds to timeout while waiting to be serviced
set max_keep_alive [expr $max_threads * 3]
set stack_size 2097152 ;# 2 MB
set max_upload_limit [expr 20 * 1024 * 1024] ;# 20 MB limit
set max_socks [expr $max_threads + $max_wait + $max_busy_threads] ;# MaxSock setting to max_threads sum plus MaxWait plus MaxBusyThreads
set nsv_buckets 48


Best Regards,

Majid.

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[Gustaf Neumann]

Hi Majid,

maxrun is one way to limit the maximum number of concurrent
connections. It allows to limit certain kinds of requests
(actually the queueing of incoming requests). See the
naviserver man page for an example

http://naviserver.sourceforge.net/n/naviserver/files/ns_limits.html

If you have max_threads set to 40, you won't have at any
time more than 40 connection threads running (no matter,
whether you set the default maxrun to 40 or 500 or leave the
default of 100). If you have no special intentions with
maxruns, i would recommend to leave it to the default.

In your snippet, you set just some Tcl variables. In several
cases it is not obvious how these are used to set the actual
config variables of aolserver. For example, the setting of
max_keep_alive wonders me: The keep-alive of the server is
controlled via the config variable "keepwait", which is a
value specified in secs. It is somewhat strange that you
seem to bring this in relation with max_threads, ... but
maybe, your naming is just misleading.

-gustaf neumann

[Majid Khan]

Hi Gaustaf,

Thanks for clarifying the maxrun param. About Tcl variables this is how I am using them:

ns_section "ns/encodings"
ns_param   .adp       "utf-8"
ns_param   .byt       "utf-8"

set myserver_root "/myserver"

set max_threads 40
set max_conns 1000 ;# or ConnsPerThread, i.e. after how many requests processed by a given thread should it be destroyed, 0 means never.
set min_threads 5

set thread_timeout 120 ;# destroy a thread after this many idle seconds

set max_busy_threads 10
set max_wait 100 ;# max number of threads waiting to be serviced
set max_wait_time 120 ;# seconds to timeout while waiting to be serviced
set max_keep_alive [expr $max_threads * 3]

set stack_size 2097152 ;# 2MB Limit

set max_upload_limit [expr 20 * 1024 * 1024] ;# 20 MB limit
set max_socks [expr $max_threads + $max_wait + $max_busy_threads] ;# MaxSock setting to max_threads sum plus MaxWait plus MaxBusyThreads
set nsv_buckets 48

ns_section ns/parameters
ns_param User myuser
ns_param ServerLog /myserver/log/error.log
ns_param LogRoll on
ns_param MaxKeepAlive $max_keep_alive
ns_param LogMaxBackup 10
ns_param ListenBacklog 32
ns_param Home /myserver
ns_param StackSize $stack_size
ns_param auxconfigdir /myserver/parameters
ns_param crashcmd ns_crash
ns_param OutputCharset utf-8
ns_param dnscache off
ns_param smtphost $smtphost
ns_param inputcharset utf-8
ns_param URLCharset utf-8

ns_section ns/threads
# use more than 1 processor (Solaris)
ns_param SystemScope on
ns_param mutexmeter true

ns_section ns/server/myserver
ns_param MinThreads $min_threads
ns_param MaxThreads $max_threads
ns_param MaxConns $max_conns
ns_param ThreadTimeout $thread_timeout
ns_param MaxBusyThreads $max_busy_threads
ns_param MaxWait $max_wait
ns_param MaxWaitTime $max_wait_time
ns_param DirectoryFile { index.html }
ns_param UrlStats off
ns_param MaxUrlStats 1000
ns_param PageRoot "$myserver_root/www"
ns_param globalstats false
ns_param enabletclpages true
ns_param checkmodifiedsince off

ns_section ns/server/myserver/fastpath
ns_param cache false
ns_param cachemaxentry 16384
ns_param cachemaxsize 5120000

ns_section ns/server/myserver/redirects
ns_param 404 /404.adp
#ns_param 500 /500.htm

ns_section ns/server/myserver/adp/parsers
ns_param adp {".adp"   ;# The simple parser looks for <\% ... \%>}
#fancy=".adp"   ;# The fancy parser does a lot more.

ns_section ns/server/bayt/module/nssock
ns_param Address $ip
ns_param Hostname $domain
ns_param Port $port
ns_param maxinput $max_upload_limit
ns_param MaxSock $max_socks

About KeepWait what you mentioned is different then maxkeepalive. The idea is if any client which uses a keep-alive connection (For HTTP/1.1 clients, persistent connections or keep-alive are the default unless otherwise specified.) it will be counted as a single request regardless of how many request has been sent using the same connection which improves the performance because it would not use any new TCP connection instead. So  in my case I have set maxkeepalive as 120 and there is no such relation between max_threads variable with that it is just my logic to have it multiply by 3 otherwise you can ignore and set it as whatever you want. I didn't set keepwait which I should thanks for mentioning that I will set it up to 30 sec which means after 30 secs hang up clients while waiting for an HTTP request in a connection in a keep-alive situation. Setting to a high value may cause performance problems in heavily loaded servers. The higher the timeout, the more server connections will be kept occupied waiting on connections with idle clients. The purpose of writing Gustaf in such a detailed way is just because I wanted to make sure what I understand is correct and others can benefit of it in our community to understand the logic of the config params.

One last thing which I found I should do is about the DNS tuning, so I have taken the following code from http://www.aolserver.com/docs/admin/config-reference.tcl.txt and will put it in my config file.

# DNS tuning
ns_param   dnscache        true      ;# In-memory cache of DNS lookups
ns_param   dnscachetimeout 60        ;# How long to keep hostnames in cache

dnscachetimeout is I think in mins.

Regards,

Majid.

[Gustaf Neumann]

I still don't get, what your are doing with "MaxKeepAlive", but i don't have to. Be aware, that aolserver does not use it as a config variable (just do a "fgrep -Ri MaxKeepAlive ." in the src directory). If your application uses MaxKeepAlive (from tcl, or from one of your c-modules), it is fine. -gustaf

[Majid Khan]

Right Gaustaf, I don't find it either, it seems it was just there till 3.x one of the thread which I found generated by you.

http://www.mail-archive.com/aols...@listserv.aol.com/msg07000.html

I will just remove that param and will keep only keepwait in params.

Regards,

Majid.

[Majid Khan]

Furthermore even I found the following params dont exist in aol4.5.1, so I will remove them too.

urlstats
MaxUrlStats
globalstats
SystemScope - not even in 4.0.11
ThreadCache - not even in 4.0.11
auxconfigdir - not even in 4.0.11
EnableHostnameLookup - not even in 4.0.11

Regards,

Majid.