2004_12_12:17:35: HOLY OUTA CONTROL CHRISTMAS LIGHTS BATMAN -
as a Slashdot subscriber
(highly recommended BTW) I see the /.'ers coming in the "Mysterious Future" ...
so we'll have to see how well the webcam holds out tonight - expect erratic behavior!
/. crushed mod_perl outa the gate ... actually, when I restarted Apache,
withen 11 seconds, I got a "server reached MaxClients setting"
which is set to 150 - I just bumped to 500, but the statically
compiled limit was 256, so that's what we got for tonight!
BTW, when restarting with that, it hit THAT limit in 9 seconds - load
factor currently over 40 - may have to drop MaxClients back to 150 so system
doesn't spin away ... but we'll see after the initial rush. So technically
it was an Apache limitation (see notes below), not mod_perl itself.
Tried to start the back-end webcam daemon process back up (which means
more work is done on the CGI too) and the loadfactor numbers skyrocketed to
"210.64, 91.92, 48.42" - yikes - but the initial rush is starting to
slow down a bit ... so I might try again after 1900 MST
OK - we're "live" ... load factor seems to be stabilizing around a 100.
Yes, I said ONE HUNDRED ... but CPU percentage is about 50%, so just a
bunch of processes in the run state.
I've tweeked the TimeOuts in httpd.conf ... but still seeing all sorts
of wierd stuff showing up in the log files and general erratic behavior.
Changed MaxClients back to 150 - there is
definately a "knee in the performance curve" somewhere above that (anyone
got an extra GByte of RAM and extra processor I can toss in) - load factor
stabilizing in the single digits and web site is slow, but responsive -
basically appears you have to wait your turn for a slot - will be adding
Upgrade to Apache2.x to the list for Christmas 2005! ;-)
Per suggestion from the folks at Morpheus Software, I set Keep Alive to NO and this seemed to help a lot - i.e.
I have extra CPU/horsepower to spare (plus minimal graphics, inclusions, etc.) so I'm willing to go with all non-persistant connections in order to free up those slots quickly.
First set of web server log numbers are up - no way I was going to do "grep's" when I was being pounded!
Check out this screenshot!
and read the Slashdot Effect Analysus