I need a server to perform lots of timing operations and trigger code accordingly.
So I'll break my wonderings into simple questions:
How are timeout and timeout callback usually work in terms of OS resources and threads?
(say the nodejs setTimeout(callback, delay))
Should I refrain from that and maybe have a timer worker to check every second for timeouts?
e.i. if i need 10 timeouts, keep a collection of all timeout timestamps and check every second if any of them is due.
What would be a good framework / platform to implement this kind of behaviour?
Please comment if you think I'm being unclear,
Thanks in advance.
"Depends"
Most timer implementations are extremely lightweight (i.e. having zillions of timers going at once). A timer core is little more than a priority queue of "things soon to expire", and then expiring them every second.
Things are different when lots of them fire all at once, that is NOT lightweight (as all the real work starts).
Related
I have a function that loops through a list of items by sending them to a server and grabbing the response. The problem I'm having is the loop is going faster than the server can handle. I need to figure out a way to slow the loop down without freezing the application. Is there a way to delay the loop from moving to the next item for a brief moment? In other languages, I'd use something like sleep(interval).
Don't slow the process down. Add the network calls to an operation queue with a limited number of concurrent operations. You may need to rewrite your network code as an NSOperation subclass but that's fairly straightforward. You can see some examples in this tutorial.
There is a built-in limit to the number of simultaneous network connections that can be made anyway, but it sounds like your server's limit is lower than that, or that you're saturating the network connections and your later calls are timing out before they've been able to start.
Instead of a sleep interval it sounds like you want a completion block that calls the same code again until the list is empty. So once it finishes the request, it goes onto the next one.
Also I don't think you should be trying to sleep since it will hold the main thread which results in a poor user experience.
I have a system which starts a new thread with each request to the application.
if application received hundreds of requests there may be not enough memory available to start a new thread so it will throw an exception.
I would like to know an ideal mechanism to handle this kind of a situation.
like, if application is receiving lots of request then if there is not enough memory or number of active threads reached the max then i will delay processing other requests.
but i have no idea how to implement this .
Easy solution: Increase thread-pool limits. This is actually viable although out of fashion these days.
More thorough solution: Use a SemaphoreSlim to limit the number of concurrently asynchronously active requests. Make sure to wait asynchronously. If you wait synchronously you'll again burn a thread while waiting. After having waited asynchronously you can resume normal synchronous blocking processing. This requires only small code changes.
Most thorough solution: Implement your processing fully async. That way you never run out of threads.
I want to load test a URL by hitting it few hundred times at same millisecond . I tried JMeter but I could hit 2 request at same millisecond. This seems to be problem that my machine cant create threads fast enough . Is there any solution to the issue ?
In JMeter you can use synchronizing timer setting it to 100, this way all threads will wait until there are 100 available and hit the server:
http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/component_reference.html#Synchronizing_Timer
Another solution is to increase the number of Threads so that you hit this throughput.
In next coming version (2.8) of JMeter you will be able to create threads on demand (created once needed).
Anyway hitting few hundred times at same millisecond is a high load so you will have to tune JMeter correctly.
Regards
Philippe
JMeter uses blocking HTTP client, in order to hit the server at the exact same time with 100 reqeusts you need 100 threads in JMeter. Even providing that, you still don't have 100 cores to actually run such code at the same time. Even if you had 100 cores, it takes some time to start a thread, so you would have to start them in advance and synchronize on some sort of barrier. And that is not supported in JMeter.
Why do you really want to run your server "at same millisecond"? An ordinary load test just calls the server with as many connections as possible, but not necessarily at the same time. Moreover, sometimes you are even adding random sleep between requests to simulate so-called think time.
As per Philippe's answer, JMeter does in fact support synchronous requests. But maybe for what you want something like Apache Bench using -c100 (or tune it to whatever works) is a better option? It's pretty basic stuff but then the overhead is a lot smaller which might help in this situation.
But I would also steal from Tomasz's answer and echo his concern that perhaps this is not really the best way to approach load testing. If you're trying to replicate real life traffic then do you really need such a high level of concurrency?
You need to use Jmeter-server and a host of client machines for load generation. Your single machine is not enough to generate the load itself.
I've been messing around with Ruby and threading a little bit today. I have a list of proxies that I want to check. Assuming a timeout of 10 seconds going through a very large list of proxies will take many hours if I write something that goes like:
proxies.each do |proxy|
check_proxy(proxy)
end
My first problem with trying to figure out threads is how to START multiple at the same exact time. I found a neat little snippet of code online:
for page in pages
threads << Thread.new(page) { |myPage|
puts "Fetching: #{myPage}\n"
doc = Hpricot(open(myPage.to_s)).to_s
puts "Got #{myPage}: #{doc.size}"
}
end
Seems to work nicely as far as starting them all at the same time. So now I can... start checking all 7 thousand records at the same time?
How do I go to a file, take out a line for each thread, run a batch of like 20 and repeat the process?
Can I run a while loop that in turn starts 20 threads at the same (which remove lines from a file) and keeps going until the file is blank?
I'm a little weak on the logic of what I'm supposed to do.
Thanks guys!
PS.
Another thought: Will there be file access issues if 20 workers are constantly messing with it randomly? What would be a good way around that if this is so?
The keyword you are after is threadpool. You can either try to find one for Ruby (I am sure there's couple at least on Github), or roll your own.
Here's a simple implementation here on SO.
Re: the file access, IMO you shouldn't let workers alter the file directly, but do it in your main thread. You don't want to allow simultaneous edits there.
Try to use gem DelayJob:
https://github.com/tobi/delayed_job
You don't need to generate that many Threads in order to do this work. In fact generating a lot of Threads can decrease the overall performance of your application. If you handle checking each proxy asynchronously, without blocking, you can get by with far fewer threads.
You'd create a file manager thread to process the file. Each line gets added as a request to an array(request queue). On the other end of the request queue you can use eventmachine to send the requests without blocking. eventmachine would also be used to receive the responses and handle the timeout. The response can then be placed on another array(response queue) which your file manager thread polls. The file manager thread pulls the responses from the response queue and resolves if the proxy exists or not.
This gets you down to just creating two threads. One issue that you will have is limiting the number of requests that have been sent since this model will be able to send out all of the requests in less than a second and flood the nearest router. In my experience you should be able to have around 500 outstanding requests at any one time.
There is more than one way to solve this problem asynchronously but hopefully the above is enough to help get you started with non-blocking I/O.
This is kind of a 2 part question
1) Is there a max number of HttpWebRequests that can be run at the same time in WP7?
I'm going to create a ScheduledTaskAgent to run a PeriodicTask. There will be 2 different REST service calls the first one will get a list of IDs for records that need to be downloaded, the second service will be used to download those records one at a time. I don't know how many records there will be my guestimage would be +-50.
2.) Would making all the individual record requests at once be a bad idea? (assuming that its possible) or should I wait for a request to finish before starting another?
Having just spent a week and a half working at getting a BackgroundAgent to stay within it's memory limits, I would suggest doing them one at a time.
You lose about half your memory to system libraries and the like, your first web request will take another nearly 20%, but it seems to reuse that memory on subsequent requests.
If you need to store the results into a local database, it is going to take a good chunk more. I have found a CompiledQuery uses less memory, which means holding a single instance of your context.
Between each call I would suggest doing a GC.Collect(), I even add a short Thread.Sleep() just to be sure the process has some time to tidying things up.
Another thing I do is track how much memory I am using and attempt to exit gracefully when I get to around 97 or 98%.
You can not use the debugger to test memory limits as the debug memory is much higher and the limits are not enforced. However, for comparative testing between versions of your code, the debugger does produce very similar result on subsequent runs over the same code.
You can track your memory usage with Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus.ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage and Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus.ApplicationMemoryUsageLimit
I write a status log into IsolatedStorage so I can see the result of runs on the phone and use ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest() to kick the off. I then use ShellToast notifications to let me know when the task runs and also when it completes, that way I can launch my app to read the status log without interrupting it.
Tyler,
My 2 cents here.
I don't believe there is any restriction on how mant HTTPWebequests you can spin up. These however have to be async, off course, and may be served from the browser stack. Most modern browsers including IE9 handle over 5 concurrently to the same domain; but you are not guaranteed a request handle immediately. However, it should not matter if you are willing to wait on a separate thread, dump your content on to the request pipe & wait for response on yet another thread. This post (here) has a nice walkthrough of why we need to do this.
Nothing wrong with this approach either, IMO. You're just going to have to wait until all the requests have their respective pipelines & then wait for the responses.
Thanks!
1) Your memory limit in a PeriodicTask or ResourceIntensiveTask is 5 MB. So you definitely should control your requests really careful. I dont think there is a limit in the code.
2)You have only 5 MB. So when you start all your requests at the same time it will terminate immediately.
3) I think you should better use a ResourceIntensiveTask because a PeriodicTask should only run 15 seconds.
Good guide for Multitasking features in Mango: http://blogs.infosupport.com/blogs/alexb/archive/2011/05/26/multi-tasking-in-windows-phone-7-1.aspx
I seem to remember (but can't find the reference right now) that the maximum number of requests that the OS can make at once is 7. You should avoid making this many at once though as it will stop other/system apps from being able to make requests.