[Building Sakai] Strange load testing results

[John Bush]

right, for example, if you are running the tests from a client box on  
an outside network and have to vpn to hit the servers.  Once I was  
really testing the cisco VPN client not Sakai.

John Bush
Development Manager
rSmart




On Nov 9, 2009, at 6:36 AM, Steven Githens wrote:

> I find a lot of the time, my desktop machine is way faster, but often
> assumed it wasn't going over the network, and skipping a bunch of  
> other
> real life infrastructure things.  Now that you mention, it would be a
> good thing to look into and quantify.
>
> -s
>
> Remi Saias wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> In the past weeks I have been performing some load tests on our
>> Sakai+OpenSyllabus server at HEC Montreal as we are planning to go
>> live for a pilot project in January.
>>
>> I used The Grinder which I found very efficient and easy to use,
>> considering that OpenSyllabus is strongly dependent on Ajax requests
>> and for this reason I could not use more classic tools relying on
>> defined pages with fixed URLs etc.
>>
>> I tested various configurations with a single scenario and was very
>> surprised to find out that our development laptops (regular laptops
>> with a CoreDuo under XP Pro) were running twice as fast as our linux
>> server which has 4 Xeon CPU at 2.8Ghz. In each case the database
>> server (mySQL 4 and 5, tested both) was running on the same machine.
>>
>> As I suspected something was incorrectly configured on the linux
>> server, I tried it at home on a less powerful linux box (Dual Core
>> 3Ghz vs Quad Xeon) and, surprise, I got a performance 4 times better.
>> I used the exact same set of sakai tools, sakai version and tomcat
>> version.
>>
>> I am still investigating this but I am starting to run out of  
>> ideas! I
>> have read confluence and added query caching (as per
>> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/MySQL+Administration
>> <http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/MySQL 
>> +Administration>),
>> but it didn't change anything at all. I tried tweaking various mySQL
>> parameters without much impact!
>>
>> Does this ring a bell to someone!? I have not yet investigated the
>> server OS/hardware configuration (maybe the disk setup, raid or
>> such...) but I thought that it might be faster to simply ask! :-)
>>
>> BTW, Sakai 2.6.0 was 20% faster than 2.5.x in my tests.
>>
>> Thanks for any help!
>> -- 
>> Rémi Saïas
>> Analyste en informatique - Technopédagogie
>> Gestion des technologies de l'information - HEC Montréal
>> Projet Sakai-OpenSyllabus: 514.340.6776 - Édifice Decelles: 4521
>>
>>
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>>
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