Throughput result on JMeter increase suddenly when using 100 threads - nginx

I tested my local website using Nginx with PHP-FPM currently by using Apache JMeter. I try to do simple concurrent load testing on it.
Here is my test plan configuration, with 3 thread groups:-
Number of threads: 10, 50, 100
Ramp-up period: 0
Loop count: 1
In the test plan itself, I have 5 different pages represent 5 HTTP requests.
But then when I used 100 threads, the throughput (request/sec) is increased than when using 50 threads. I have run this many times, the result still same.
What is really happening here? I'm still amateur about JMeter. Your help would be appreciated.

Possibility of increase in throughput on increasing the load is generally:
Increased error rate, more errors will increase the throughput.
hope this will help.

Related

ASP.Net Core Performance on Azure vs Local

I have a website with a function that generates a report in Excel that is pretty much just a datadump, approx 16000 rows, using EPPlus. This report keeps timing out for the users on Azure. The timeout (524) is a cloudflare limit if the request takes longer than 100 seconds.
I have optimised the hell out of it using Hashsets and Dictionaries, and it now runs in under 2 seconds on my laptop in Debug. I've also tried publishing with the target runtime as win-x64, in case it's a memory allocation issue.
Initially I thought the bottleneck would be memory. After setting up Application Insights, I can see that the CPU is at 100% while the memory is fairly low, about 300MB. I've bumped the Service Plan up to the P3V2 (14GB RAM & 840 ACU) to test if it's just a resource allocation issue. Even at that level, it takes about 50-60 seconds to produce. I can't run the app at that level, so I need to get it down much lower.
I'm not sure how else to optimise this, or identify the bottleneck. Any ideas?

How can we stimulate 10000 concurrent request?

Is there a way to stimulate 10000 concurrent HTTP request?
I try siege tool
but only have 2000 request limit for my laptop
How can I make 10000 request?
The most simple approach to generate a huge amount of concurrent requests, it probably Apache's ab tool.
For example, ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.example.com/ would request the given websites a 100 times, with a concurrency of 10 requests.
It is true that the number of simultaneous requests is limited by nature. Keep in mind that TCP only has 65536 available ports, some of which are already occupied and the first 1024 are usually reserved, this leaves you with a theoretical maximum of around 64500 ports per machine for outgoing request.
Then there are the operating system limits. For example, in Linux there are the kernel parameters in the net.ipv4.* group.
Finally, you should of course configure your HTTP server to handle that amount of simultaneous requests. In Apache, those are StartServers and its friends, in nginx it's worker_processes and worker_connections. Also, if you have some stand-alone dynamic processor attached to your webserver (such as php-fpm), you must raise the number of idle processes in the connection pool, too.
After all, the purpose of massive parallel requests should be to find your bottle necks, and the above steps will give you a fair idea.
Btw. if you use ab, read its final report thoroughly. It may seem brief, but it carries a lot of useful information (e.g. "non-2xx responses" may indicate server-side errors due to overload.)
Jmeter allows distributed testing, which means that you can setup up a set of computers (one acting as a master and the rest as slaves) to run as many threads as you need. Jmeter has a very good doc explaining this here . . .
http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/jmeter_distributed_testing_step_by_step.pdf
and some more info here . . .
http://digitalab.org/2013/06/distributed-testing-in-jmeter/
You can set this all up on the cloud as well if you do not have access to sufficient slave machines, there are a couple of services out there for this.
Have you tried using Apache JMeter? You can create a web test plan and there are several options which you can play with. You can wrap the requests in a ThreadGroup as outlined here. You can generate extensive reports and graphs as well. If the simple thread group is not enough you could potentially try using the UltimateThreadGroup plugin for JMeter.
When creating so many threads with JMeter on a single machine you run out of memory to allocate a new stack for a thread. For that you can potentially consider reducing the stack space for the thread. How to do that is explained in the SO answer here. The post has some other alternative approaches as well.
If there isn't an OS limit of the number of simultaneous TCP connections allowed, there is a registry setting that removes or increases that limit. After you made sure that isn't the case, you could write some JavaScript that includes AJAX requests and put it in a loop.
You would probably need node.js to execute the JavaScript.

Odd Asp.Net threadpool sizing behavior

I am load testing an .Net 4.0 MVC application hosted on IIS 7.5 (default config, in particular processModel autoconfig=true), and am observing odd behavior in how .Net manages the threads.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0ka9477y(v=vs.100).aspx mentions that "When a minimum is reached, the thread pool can create additional threads or wait until some tasks complete".
It seems the duration that threads are blocked for, plays a role in whether it creates new threads or waits for tasks to complete. Not necessarily resulting in optimal throughput.
Question: Is there any way to control that behavior, so threads are generated as needed and request queuing is minimized?
Observation:
I ran two tests, on a test controller action, that does not do much beside Thread.Sleep for an arbirtrary time.
50 requests/second with the page sleeping 1 second
5 requests/second with the page sleeping for 10 seconds
For both cases .Net would ideally use 50 threads to keep up with incoming traffic. What I observe is that in the first case it does not do that, instead it chugs along executing some 20 odd requests concurrently, letting the incoming requests queue up. In the second case threads seem to be added as needed.
Both tests generated traffic for 100 seconds. Here are corresponding perfmon screenshots.
In both cases the Requests Queued counter is highlighted (note the 0.01 scaling)
50/sec Test
For most of the test 22 requests are handled concurrently (turquoise line). As each takes about a second, that means almost 30 requests/sec queue up, until the test stops generating load after 100 seconds, and the queue gets slowly worked off. Briefly the number of concurrency jumps to just above 40 but never to 50, the minimum needed to keep up with the traffic at hand.
It is almost as if the threadpool management algorithm determines that it doesn't make sense to create new threads, because it has a history of ~22 tasks completing (i.e. threads becoming available) per second. Completely ignoring the fact that it has a queue of some 2800 requests waiting to be handled.
5/sec Test
Conversely in the 5/sec test threads are added at a steady rate (red line). The server falls behind initially, and requests do queue up, but no more than 52, and eventually enough threads are added for the queue to be worked off with more than 70 requests executing concurrently, even while load is still being generated.
Of course the workload is higher in the 50/sec test, as 10x the number of http requests is being handled, but the server has no problem at all handling that traffic, once the threadpool is primed with enough threads (e.g. by running the 5/sec test).
It just seems to not be able to deal with a sudden burst of traffic, because it decides not to add any more threads to deal with the load (it would rather throw 503 errors than add more threads in this scenario, it seems). I find this hard to believe, as a 50 requests/second traffic burst is surely something IIS is supposed to be able to handle on a 16 core machine. Is there some setting that would nudge the threadpool towards erring slightly more on the side of creating new threads, rather than waiting for tasks to complete?
Looks like it's a known issue:
"Microsoft recommends that you tune the minimum number of threads only when there is load on the Web server for only short periods (0 to 10 minutes). In these cases, the ThreadPool does not have enough time to reach the optimal level of threads to handle the load."
Exactly describes the situation at hand.
Solution: Slightly increased the minWorkerThreads in machine.config to handle expected traffic burst. (4 would give us 64 threads on the 16 core machine).

Threads and requests confusion

If I have a site and each request has its own thread, does this mean that 1000 visitors will spawn 1000 threads? How does this work (obviously that can't be right)?
Thanks
Threads in ASP.NET are handled via a ThreadPool.
Requests are pooled across the ThreadPool, so each request can be handled by a different thread, but the threads can be reused, preventing the 1000 threads for 1000 requests scenario you mentioned.
For more details, see this CodeProject article on Multi-Threading in ASP.NET.
Yes, it is right. If you have 1 thread per visitor and 1000 visitors that makes for 1000 threads. It may not perform well, but that's another matter.
Fr multi-threaded server applications, you typically have 3 different allocation systems:
1 thread for all visitors - each one takes it in turn;
1 thread per visitor - obvious;
a combination fo the 2 - 1 pool of threads (say 10) and visitors get 1 each until thet're all used whereupon new visitors wait.

What is the highest number of threads that is reasonable to simultaneously run in Jmeter?

I want to use the highest possible number of threads (to use less computers) but without making the bottleneck to be in the client.
JMeter can simulate a very High Load provided you use it right.
Don't listen to Urban Legends that say JMeter cannot handle high load.
Now as for answer, it depends on:
your machine power
your jvm 32 bits or 64 bits
your jvm allocated memory -Xmx
your test plan ( lot of beanshell, post processor, xpath ... Means lots of cpu)
your os configuration (tunable)
Gui / non gui mode
So there is no theorical answer but following Best Practices will ensure JMeter performs well.
Note that with jmeter you can distribute load through remote testing, read:
Remote Testing > 15.4 Using a different sample sender
And finally use cloud based testing if it's not enough.
Read this for tuning tips:
http://www.ubik-ingenierie.com/blog/jmeter_performance_tuning_tips/
Read this book for doing load testing and using JMeter correctly.
I have used JMeter a fair bit and found it is not great at generating really high load. On a 2Ghz Core2 Duo with 2Gb memory you can reasonably expect about 100 threads.
That being said, it is best to run it on your hardware so that the CPU of the PC does not peak at 100% - a stable 80%-90% is best otherwise the results are affected.
I have also tried WAPT 5 - it successfully ran 1000+ threads from the same PC. It is not free but it is more useable than JMeter but doesn't have all of the features.
Outdated answer since at least version 2.6 see https://stackoverflow.com/a/11922239/460802 for a more up to date one.
The JMeter Wiki reports cases where JMeter was used with as much as 1000 threads. I have used it with at most 100 threads, but the Links in the Wiki suggest resource reductions I never tried.
One of the issues we had with running JMeter on Windows XP was the Windows XP TCP Connection Limit. Limit should be removed in order to run use the JMeter to workstation’s full potential
More info here. AFAIK, does not apply to other OS.
I used JMeter since 2004 and i launched lot of load tests.
With PC Windows 7 64 bits 4Go RAM iCore5.
I think JMeter can support 300 to 400 concurrent threads for Http (Sampler) protocol with only one "Aggregate Report Listener" who writes in the log file results and timers between call pages.
For a big load test you could configure JMeter with slaves (load generators) like this
http://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/HttpSimpleTableServer/
I have already done tests with 11 PC slaves to simulate 5000 threads.
I have not used JMeter, but the answer probably depends on your hardware. Best bet might be to establish metrics of performance, guess at the number of threads and then run a binary search as follows.
Source was Wikipedia.
Number guessing game...
This rather simple game begins something like "I'm thinking of an integer between forty and sixty inclusive, and to your guesses I'll respond 'High', 'Low', or 'Yes!' as might be the case." Supposing that N is the number of possible values (here, twenty-one as "inclusive" was stated), then at most questions are required to determine the number, since each question halves the search space. Note that one less question (iteration) is required than for the general algorithm, since the number is already constrained to be within a particular range.
Even if the number we're guessing can be arbitrarily large, in which case there is no upper bound N, we can still find the number in at most steps (where k is the (unknown) selected number) by first finding an upper bound by repeated doubling. For example, if the number were 11, we could use the following sequence of guesses to find it: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 12, 10, 11
One could also extend the technique to include negative numbers; for example the following guesses could be used to find −13: 0, −1, −2, −4, −8, −16, −12, −14, −13
It is more dependent on the kind of performance testing you do(load, spike, endurance etc) on a specific server (a little on hardware dependency)
Keep in mind around these parameters
- the client machine on which you are targeting the run of jmeter, there will be a certain amount of heap memory allocated, ensure to have a healthy allocation so that the script does not error out. The highest i had run on jmeter was 1500 on a local environment ( client - server arch), On a Web arch, the highest i had a run was based upon Non- functional requirement were limited to 250 threads,
so it ideally depends on the kinds of performance testing and deployment style and so on..
There is not standard number for this. The maximum number of threads that you can generate from one computer depends completely on the computer's hardware and the OS. The OS by default occupies certain amount of CPU and the RAM.
To find out the maximum threads your computer can handle you can prepare a sample test and run it with only a few threads. Then with each cycle of test run increase the number of threads gradually. During this you also need to monitor the CPU, RAM, Disk I/O and Network I/O of your computer. The moment any of these reach near or beyond 80% (Again for you to decide if near is okay for you or beyond), that is the maximum number of threads your computer can handle. To be on the safer side I would stop at the number when the resource utilization reaches 70%.
It'll depend on the hardware you run on as well as the underlying script. I've always felt that this fuzziness is the biggest problem with traditional load testing tools. If you've got a small budget ($200 or so gets you a LOT of testing), check out my company's load testing service, BrowserMob.
Besides our Real Browser Users (RBUs) which control thousands on actual browsers for the purpose of performance and load testing, we also have traditional virtual users (VUs). Scripts are written in JavaScript and can make various HTTP calls.
The reason I bring it up is that I always felt that the game of trying to figure out how many VUs you can fit on your load gen hardware is dangerous. It's so easy to get bad results without realizing it.
To solve that for BrowserMob, we took an extremely conservative approach on the number of VUs and RBUs per CPU core: no more than 1 browser or 50 threads per CPU core, and sometimes much less. In the world of cloud computing, CPU cycles are so cheap that it just doesn't make sense to try to overload machines.

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