Memory footprint for large systems in Vaadin - performance

I'm working in financial sector and we are about to select Vaadin 7 for development of large heavy load system.
But I'm a bit worried about Vaadin memory footprint for large systems since Vaadin keeps all state in session. It means that for every new user all application state will be stored in memory, won't it?
We cannot aford to build monolithic system - system must be scalable and agile instead. Since we have huge client base it must be easy to customize and ready to grow.
Could anyone please share the experience and possible workarounds how to minimize or eliminate those problems in Vaadin?

During the development of our products we faced the problem of large memory footprint using the default Vaadin architecture.
The Vaadin architecture is based on components driven by events. Using components is fairly simple to create a tightly coupled application. The reason is that components are structured into a hierarchy. It's like a pyramid. The larger application is built; the larger pyramid is stored in the session for each user.
In order to significantly reduce the memory allocation we've created a page based approach for the application with a comprehensive event model on the background using the old school state management. It is based on the Statechart notation in XML format.
As the result the session keeps only visited pages during the user workflow, described by the Statechart configuration. When the user finishes the workflow, all the pages are released to be collected by garbage collector.
To see the difference we have done some tests to compare memory allocated for the user working with the application.
The applications developed:
with tightly coupled approach consume from 5 to 15MB of heap per user
with loose-coupled approach - up to 2 MB
We are quite happy with results since it let us scale the large system using 4GB RAM up to 1000-1500 concurrent users per server.
Almost forgot. We used Lexaden Web Flow library. It is with Apache license.

I think you should have a look here: https://vaadin.com/blog/-/blogs/vaadin-scalability-study-quicktickets
Plus, I have found the following info by people who run Vaadin in production.
Balázs Hódossy:
We have a back office system with more than 10 000 users. The daily
user number is about 3000 but half of them use the system 8 hours
without logout. We use Liferay 6.0.5 Tomcat bundle and Vaadin as
portlet. Our two servers have 48 GB RAM and we give Tomcat 24 GB heap.
DB got 18 GB and the system the rest. Measure the heap to the session
size, concurrent users, and the activity. More memory cause more
rarely but longer full GC. We plan to increase the number of Tomcat
workers and reduce the heap. When you measure your server, try to add
a little bit more memory. If the cost is so important than decrease
the processor cost and buy more RAM. Most of the time it is valuable
with a little tuning.
Pierre-Emmanuel Gros:
For 1000 dayly user heavyly used , a pure vaadin application: Server
3 gb 2 core Jetty with ulimit to 50000 Postgresql 9 with 50
concurent users ( a connection pool is used). As software part, I used also ehcache to cache DTO objects,and pure JDBC.

Related

Liferay 6.2 Session autoextend Disadvantages

I found that it's possible to automatically extend Liferay's session. So that the session doesn't expire till you close your browser. Is there any limitations or disadvantages of such approach. Any performance degrade or load issues?
As with any abstract question about hypothetical performance impact (or preliminary optimization) this question is basically unanswerable - but here's some criteria:
Naturally, pinging the server in order to extend a session will incur some extra load - if that results in a performance decrease, you'll most likely have a highly congested installation in the first place. If your server is bored all day, the extra ping won't bring it down.
You may or may not have custom applications running in your installation that store data in the user's session. If those are a few bytes (like Liferay does, e.g. the currently logged in user's information): There's probably no degradation. If you store 1MB of information per session (in your own custom apps - Liferay doesn't do this), things might differ: Just multiply your session storage size by the number of concurrent users that you expect. In case this use of memory indicates a problem: Make your custom apps use the session less - it's bad style anyway.
Will your particular installation suffer from any degradation? Measure. There's no way around this.
From a system maintenance point of view: If you're running a cluster and want to take individual machines out of the load balancer: Artificially extending sessions might indicate that a machine still has sessions open, even though they're mostly on unattended browsers - you'll get inflated numbers and it takes longer to bring machines down when you need to wait for the session count to come close to zero.

Grails Quartz job performance degrades / slows over time

We have a situation where we have a Grails 2.3.11 based application that uses Quartz (version 2.2.1 / Grails Quartz plugin version 1.0.2) jobs to do certain long running processes (1-5 minutes) in background so that a polling service allows the browser to fetch the progress. This is used primarily for import and export of data from the application. For example, when the application first starts, the export for 200,000+ rows takes approx 2 minutes. The following day the export takes 3+ minutes. The third day the export takes more than 6 minutes.
We have narrowed the problem down to just the Quartz jobs. When the system is in the degraded state all other web pages respond with nearly identical response times as when the system is in optimal condition. It appears that the Quartz jobs tend to slowdown linearly or incrementally over the period of 2 to 3 days. This may be usage related or time, for which we are uncertain.
We are familiar with the memory leak bug reported by Burt Beckwith and added the fix to our code. We were experiencing the memory leak before but now memory management appears to be health, even when the job performance is 5-10x slower than
The jobs use GORM for most of the queries. We've optimized some to use criterias with projects so they are light weight but haven't been able to change all the logic over so there are a number of Gorm objects. In the case of the exports we've changed the queries to be read-only. The logic also clears out the hibernate session appropriately to limit the number of objects in memory.
Here are a few additional details:
The level-2 cache is disabled
Running on Tomcat 7
Using MySQL 5.6
Using Java JDK 1.7.0_72
Linux
System I/O, swapping and CPU are all well within reason
Heap and Permgen memory usage is reasonable
Garbage collection is stable and reasonably consistent based on usage levels
The issue occurs even when there is only a single user
We have done period stack/thread dump analysis
We have been profiling the application with xRebel (development) and AppDynamics (production) as well we have Java Melody installed into the application
We had this problem with Grails 1.3.8 but recently upgraded to 2.3.11 which may have exasperated the problem.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
John

How to reduce memory usage on windows azure shared website?

I have a site hosted on Windows Azure shared websites. It just got suspended for going over memory usage limit of 512MB/hour.
I do use .net caching rather heavily (to prevent multiple calls to database/external APIs, etc...).
Is that caching a no-no in shared websites on Windows Azure?
Do you use System.Runtime.Cache? You should be able to limit the amount of caching e.g. the memorycache object uses. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd941874.aspx for more information.
Even if you will stop using Cache it still can be used by framework/libs. I also have same problem (interesting, that in free mode memory limit is 1024MB, but shared one is lowered to 512).
As I see, memory amount that Azure shows on portal seems very close to System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().PrivateMemorySize value.
At this moment I'm experimenting with caching settings to set maximum memory:
<system.web>
<caching>
<cache privateBytesLimit="250000000" privateBytesPollTime="00:00:15"/>
</caching>
</system.web>
Several days ago I set 300MB but several minutes ago got suspended again :(, so lowering to 250MB.
But anyway, this is very unclear, strange and "wrong" solution imho.
UPDATE
Got suspended again this morning. Temporarily converted to standard mode with small instance (1.7 GB RAM).
My WorkingSet counter now is about 200 megs now (with PeakWorkingSet 330 megs). BUT! GC's CollectionCount is increased approx 8 times (Gen0 is 1800 times instead of 250 for less that a day).
My current theory is that in "shared" mode websites are running inside "big" VM with a lot of memory and Garbage Collector just not have a need to run often, leading to longer "garbage life" and more memory consumption.
Have no access to my developer computer right now for some verification, but planing to convert site to web role in cloud service ASAP - with extra small instance (cost is comparable to shared web site cost)...
Might be worth checking a profile using perfmon on your local machine to see if what if its hitting the limits normally first, then look at maybe configuring the logging on Azure and again digging through it.
Also ensuring everything is precompiled and that your not loading and modules etc you don't need can really effect performance etc on Azure.
I think what you might want to try here is scale our instead of up. If you add a second instance that will double your resource limit.

Performance of a Vaadin front end on Apache Tomcat

The main form of my Vaadin application (running on Ubuntu server and Tomcat) takes enormous amount of time to load (more than 1 minute).
It's very simple and the web server is not under load (only a couple of users access this web server).
How can I find out why this performance problem occurs (and where is the bottleneck) ?
Vaadin by itself takes just couple of kilobytes per application. Try not to load lots of views and data in memory upfront in init. Instead, do that lazily.
I am also relatively new to Vaadin, but I can tell you this is not normal. We are running our Vaadin application on both Tomcat 6 and 7 with only a few seconds of start up time (Mac O/S). We deploy to Fedora for production.
Vaadin does take a lot of memory, and I would suggest that you check your Tomcat startup parameters to see how much is used and maybe increase it. This is the -Xmx512m switch when you run TC or any java app. I would say that 512m is really an absolute minimum for Tomcat/Vaadin for testing and 5 to 10X that or more would be used for a production environment.
Java memory defaults depend on your version of java and could be insufficient.
Smaller of 1/4th of the physical memory or 1GB. Before J2SE 5.0, the
default maximum heap size was 64MB.

Weblogic capacity sizing

Please can anyone suggest.We are trying to estimate how manay managed server instances are required in a weblogic domain and how many servers would we need as well.
Our estimate is that on there will be 10,000 concurrent users(doesn't include logged in users) for the application
and about 400 transactions per second and each http session will carry around 40kB data..
How many managed servers would we
ideally need ?
How many windows vm's & cpu's would we need ideally.Each windows vm has memory of 4gb
We are planning to allocate atleast 1 Gb memory to each managed server.
the weblogic environment will be on virtualisation farm with each vm having around 5GB memory..
Many thanks
In my experience, it is impossible to size an architecture armed with just numbers like this. I realize that's all you got right now, but I would recommend you set up one of your servers, place a servlet there that simulates your transaction time and use a tool like JMeter to hit it to see where it breaks.
BTW, there can be many other bottlenecks - is your database up to handling 400 transactions/sec?

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