Support #721

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bad performance with many channels and large history

Added by Dmitrijs Ledkovs 4311 days ago. Updated 2883 days ago.

Status:Feedback Start:06/08/2012
Priority:Normal Due date:
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Votes: 1 (View)

Description

<xnox_> I am not happy
<xnox_> smuxi was eating 100% cpu on my server
<xnox_> and reconnecting to server was painfully slow upto 10 minutes to load up the channel user lists & the backlogs
<xnox_> and I only had something like 20 channels open
* xnox_ maybe fiddled with persistent storage settings too much
<xnox_> overall I'm using xchat right now
<xnox_> should i be using daily PPA or will that not make a difference
<Cobrian> Sounds like a bug to me
<Cobrian> I don't think meebey has fiddled with the server side too much lately
<Cobrian> Was the 100% CPU condition on from server start or did it appear after extended use?
<Cobrian> (how long was the server component on before you had problems?)
<xnox_> like a few weeks
<xnox_> i killed and restarted the server
<xnox_> reconnecting from the client cause it to go into 100% cpu again
<xnox_> and taking forever to load the backlog.
<xnox_> Cobrian: how long does a reconnect to the server take for you? (and reload all the channels)
<Cobrian> Uhh, at 9 channels currently, with a 50k persistent buffer, maybe a minute with my 100Mbps line?
<Cobrian> Haven't really timed it, fast enough for me to not really mind
<Cobrian> Oh right, and it's a bit slower than that since I only have g-WLAN, so 54mbit maximum
<Cobrian> I doubt such bandwidth is really even required, it's more about parsing the buffers at both ends, maybe
<Cobrian> I remember how meebey spent several weeks just making sure he had squeezed as much speed out of the parser as possible
<xnox_> well I have 100Mbps & 50k persistent buffer and it takes on the range of 15-20 minutes to get all the channels & backlogs
<xnox_> I have about 20 channels
<xnox_> something is not right, maybe my server is throttled?
<Cobrian> Might be, shouldn't take that long
<Cobrian> Is it a physical server or a virtual one?
<xnox_> ec2 micro
<xnox_> virtual
<xnox_> how to migrate servers correctly?
<xnox_> smuxi server that is
<Cobrian> Hmm. The connect phase does use up some cycles, but I'm not familiar with cloud farms to know how badly they start throttling cpu use if they detect a sudden spike
<xnox_> $ du --si -s .local/share/smuxi/*
<xnox_> 151M .local/share/smuxi/buffers
<xnox_> 60M .local/share/smuxi/logs
<xnox_> and the server has 5Mbit/s symetric link or so
<Cobrian> Copying those over should be enough, although I might consider clearing the buffer dir and deleting the original ini file
<xnox_> if I have to redownload *everything* every single time that's bad.
<Cobrian> And setting it up again
<xnox_> I see no local artifacts, so does it not cache locally and synchronise the delta with the server?
<Cobrian> No local caches
<xnox_> that means I should move my server to LAN, but that will suck when I go away to a conference
<Cobrian> Set your scrollbacks to be shorter, that might help
<xnox_> which one of the settings? cause I still want full logs, at least on the server.... but then notifications will be wrong =(
<Cobrian> Buffer lines
<Cobrian> That's the amount the client will download on connect
<xnox_> It was exceptionaly useful to suspend, move to new meeting room, resume and get the messages across during the UDS
<Cobrian> At some point there should be a system which will download more scrollback when you scroll past the local client cache
<Cobrian> But that's still in development I think
<xnox_> yeah something like http://www.smuxi.org/issues/show/591 but on steroids
<xnox_> do last bandwidth connection, and then start sync up
<Cobrian> There should be a ticket for it...
<xnox_> but I don't understand the reasons for not downloading / keeping historic cache locally
<xnox_> apart from 'not developed yet'
<xnox_> =)
<Cobrian> It's kept in memory I believe, at least my current backlog is loads longer than the 2000 I have my buffer set at
<Cobrian> As long as you don't quit the client, it should just delta
<xnox_> but I do want to quick my client =/
<xnox_> s/quick/quit
* xnox_ does reboot testing
<Cobrian> But the buffer type labels in the preferences are a bit unclear
<xnox_> of kernel/filesystems/installer etc.
<Cobrian> Well, that's what you get for running stuff on a testbed :D
* xnox_ only has one machine =(((((
<xnox_> and no VM is not bare metal testing
<Cobrian> Get a xenclient base and do two VM's on your workstation machine
<Cobrian> Xenclient is as close as
<Cobrian> Especially when you can pick which VM gets hardware level access
* xnox_ works on linux and doesn't like citrix name...
<Cobrian> I tried it, only reason I didn't continue was that my fingerprint reader didn't work and the fact it kept doing weird artefacts on screen sometimes
<Cobrian> Xen stuff is basically a minimal linux that runs the vm base layer
<xnox_> http://www.smuxi.org/issues/show/685 ?
<Cobrian> Yeah, that and just wayback scrolling, first to engine buffer and then over to logs, even
<Cobrian> There's been talk some time back but I guess meebey just hasn't found a good way to bring it about
<xnox_> so right now my option is to move the server to LAN or to continue using xchat, which is actually very nice
<xnox_> and I am not going to use irssi
<Cobrian> Well, yeah, unfortunately, unless meebey is lurking and decides to help you debug the server side, because I'm still convinced it's either a bug caused by you doing the move instead of installing a new engine from scratch alltogether, or a problem caused by EC2
<xnox_> i never moved the engine
<xnox_> i want to move it now, due to performance

Related issues

blocked by Smuxi - Feature #717 New message history backend: LevelDB New 05/27/2012

History

Updated by Mirco Bauer 4308 days ago

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This sounds like an issue with the persistent message buffer which is stored in the db4o database. I am working on a new message backend which will be leveldb based and should use much less resources, memory and CPU wise. See #717 for more details.

Updated by Mirco Bauer 2883 days ago

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  • Status changed from New to Feedback

Smuxi uses SQLite now, can you re-test and say if the situation improved? Our benchmarks showed SQLite is much faster.

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