Re: Overwhelming a Web Application Server

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Walden H. Leverich
> I disagree completely, app and web servers can deal with immensely
> complex and intense workloads, just look at large web sites ...

Okay, if that's the case then maybe we can get down to specifically what they do to manage intense workloads. What I'd like to get to are specific configuration settings and automatic adjustments as opposed to unleashing a team of skilled programmers and technicians to code around the problem, or throw additional hardware at it, or deploy applications across multiple hardware tiers, or set-up and analyze various monitors - where humans are actually managing the workloads.  What do application and web servers do to "manage" intense workloads?

> As for bottleneck vs. resource contention, the difference is?

Good question.  And perhaps no matter how we define the terms the result is about the same from an end-user's perspective.

But say we set ThreadsPerChild to 20, even though we anticipate 1,000 unique visitors within a few minutes of opening the application to the Internet.  That would be a bottleneck.  On the other hand, if we were to set it to 1,000, that could lead to the HTTP server launching about 500 pre-fork instances of PHP.  That would be resource contention (memory & CPU).

I see what you mean about contention over record locks, but I view that as an application design problem - not something to be managed by an application server.

Nathan.