[Popcon-developers] popcon issues

[pere@hungry.com (Petter Reinholdtsen)]

[Bill Allombert]
> Not about duplicated UID.
>
> However I start to believe that the issue is that the webserver is too
> slow to answer:

Also, according to siege it can handle around 18 transactions per second
for this static page.

  % siege -t20s http://popcon.debian.org/
  ** SIEGE 2.70
  ** Preparing 15 concurrent users for battle.
  The server is now under siege...
  Lifting the server siege...      done.
  Transactions:                    363 hits
  Availability:                 100.00 %
  Elapsed time:                  19.94 secs
  Data transferred:               1.19 MB
  Response time:                  0.33 secs
  Transaction rate:              18.20 trans/sec
  Throughput:                     0.06 MB/sec
  Concurrency:                    6.09
  Successful transactions:         363
  Failed transactions:               0
  Longest transaction:            0.36
  Shortest transaction:           0.31
  [...]

Starting the submit script is a lot slower:

  % siege -t20s http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi
  ** SIEGE 2.70
  ** Preparing 15 concurrent users for battle.
  The server is now under siege...
  Lifting the server siege...      done.
  Transactions:                    144 hits
  Availability:                 100.00 %
  Elapsed time:                  19.32 secs
  Data transferred:               0.02 MB
  Response time:                  1.41 secs
  Transaction rate:               7.45 trans/sec
  Throughput:                     0.00 MB/sec
  Concurrency:                   10.53
  Successful transactions:         144
  Failed transactions:               0
  Longest transaction:            1.79
  Shortest transaction:           0.71
  [...]

This mean at best, around 26000 submissions can be received in an hour
or around 450 in a minute.  In reality it is slower to process a
submission than to reject an invalid one, so the real capasity will be
lower.

I tested a real submission using 'time', and it used 0.83 second to
deliver my popcon report via http, on average over 3 deliveries.  That
is in the range listed above (0.71 - 1.79 s).

Perhaps it is time to cluster the reception of requests?  How are Ubuntu
able to handle the load they are receiving?  Should we use their script
instead?

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen