I am using the Web Stress Tester tool from Faststream to stress-test a web request, and it has an option for keeping the connection alive.
I'll reckon that for the usual web request (say a request to a PHP page), the connection is closed after the web server processes the request and send back. Is it accurate to say that I should not keep the connection alive for such cases?
IP session setup and tear down are expensive, hence the addition of items in HTTP 1.1 which leverage already open connections instead of establishing a new one to download additional items. You may need to take a look at the documentation from Web Stress Tester to see if this is what is being referenced. You might also way to take a look at the w3c documentation on HTTP 1.1 to familiarize yourself with the additions related to session management which come with the update.
In general, however, you would want to model your behavior as closely as possible to your actual end user behavior to make your test the best predictor possible of end user behavior in production. If you have an application which keeps sessions alive that you are modeling, then by all means enable the setting. If your application does not keep alive the current session then don't enable the option.
Related
I have an application hosted in openshift. Now I want figure out how many request can handle in order to check the speed and availability.
So my first attempt will be generate a multiple HTTP GET requests to my Rest Service(made in python and hosted in openshift).
My fear is can get my IP workplace banned regarding this looks like an attack.
In the other hand I see there are tools like New Relic or DataDog to check metrics, but I don't know if I can simulate http requests and then check the response times.
Openshift Response
I finally wrote to Openshift support and they told me I can simulate http requests without worries.
I recall the default behavior being that each gear can handle 16 concurrent connections, then auto-scaling would kick in and you would get a new gear. Therefore I would think it makes sense to start by testing that a gear works well with 16 users at once. If not, then you can change the scaling policy to what works best for you application.
BlazeMeter is a tool that could probably help with creating the connections. They mention 100,000 concurrent users on that main page so I don't think you have to worry about getting banned for this sort of test.
I have a realtime HTML5 canvas game that runs off a node backend. Players are connected via Websocket (socket.io). The problem is sometimes I need to deploy new code (hotfixes for instance) and restart the server but I don't want to disconnect players.
My idea for this was to divide the websocket server and application server into separately deployable components and add a message queue in the middle to decouple the 2 components. That way if the application server was rebooting there would just be a short delay while the messages bunch up but nothing would be lost. Is this a good strategy? Is there an alternative?
It's very possible for websocket based applications to be restarted without the user noticing anything (that's the case for my chat server for example).
To make that possible, the solution isn't to have a websocket application isolated and never restarted. In fact this would be very optimistic (are you sure you could ensure its API is never changed ?).
A solution is
to ensure the client reconnects if disconnected (this is standard if you use socket.io for websocketing)
to make the server ask the client its id (or session id) on client initiated reconnection
to persists the state of the application. This is usually done with a database. If your server has no other state than the queue between clients (which is a little unlikely) then you might look for an existing persistent queue implementation or build your own over a fast local storage (redis comes to mind)
I am writing my first .NET MVC application and I am using the Code-First approach. I have recently learned how to configure two SQL Servers installations for High Availability using a Mirror Database and a Witness (not to be confused with Failover Clusters) to do the failover process. I think this would be a great time to practice both things by mounting my web app into a highly-available DB.
Now, for what I learned (correct me if I'm wrong) in the mirror configuration you have the witness failover to the secondary DB if the first one goes down... but your application will also need to change the connection string to reference the secondary server.
What is the best approach to have both addresses in the Web.config (or somewhere else) and choosing the right connection string?
I have zero experience with connecting to Mirrored databases, so this is all heresy! :)
The short of it may be you may not have to do anything special, as long as you pass along the FailoverPartner attribute in your connection string. The long of it is you may need additional error handling to attempt a new connection so the data provide will actually use the FailoverPartner name in the new connection.
There seems to be some good information with Connecting Clients to a Database Mirroring Session to get started. Have you had a chance to check that out?
If not, its there with Making the Initial Connection where they introduce the FailoverPartner attribute of the ConnectionString property attributes.
Reconnecting to a Database Mirroring Session suggests that on any client disconnect due to failover, the client will need to trap this exception and be prepared to reconnect:
The application must become aware of
the error. Then, the application needs
to close the failed connection and
open a new connection using the same
connection string attributes.
If the FailoverPartner attribute is available, this process should be relatively transparent to the client.
If the above doesn't work, then you might need to actually introduce some logic at the application tier to track who is the primary node, the failover node, and connection strings for each, and be prepared to persist that information somewhere - much like the data access provider should be doing for us (eyes wide open).
There is also this ServerFault post on database mirroring with Sql Server that might be of interest from an operational viewpoint that has additional reference information.
Hopefully someone with actual experience will back up any of this!
This may be totally off base, but what if you had a load balancer between your web server and the database servers?
The Load Balancer would have both databases in it's pool, using basic health check techniques (e.g ping, etc).
Your configuration would then only need to point to the IP of the Load Balancer, and wouldn't need to change.
This is what these network devices are good for. It's not the job of the programming framework (ASP.NET) to make decisions on the health of servers.
I have one app. that consists of "Manager" and "Worker". Currently, the worker always initiates the connection, says something to the manager, and the manager will send the response.
Since there is a LOT of communication between the Manager and the Worker, I'm considering to have a socket open between the two and do the communication. I'm also hoping to initiate the interaction from both sides - enabling the manager to say something to the worker whenever it wants.
However, I'm a little confused as to how to deal with "collisions". Say, the manager decides to say something to the worker, and at the same time the worker decides to say something to the manager. What will happen? How should such situation be handled?
P.S. I plan to use Netty for the actual implementation.
"I'm also hoping to initiate the interaction from both sides - enabling the manager to say something to the worker whenever it wants."
Simple answer. Don't.
Learn from existing protocols: Have a client and a server. Things will work out nicely. Worker can be the server and the Manager can be a client. Manager can make numerous requests. Worker responds to the requests as they arrive.
Peer-to-peer can be complex with no real value for complexity.
I'd go for a persistent bi-directional channel between server and client.
If all you'll have is one server and one client, then there's no collision issue... If the server accepts a connection, it knows it's the client and vice versa. Both can read and write on the same socket.
Now, if you have multiple clients and your server needs to send a request specifically to client X, then you need handshaking!
When a client boots, it connects to the server. Once this connection is established, the client identifies itself as being client X (the handshake message). The server now knows it has a socket open to client X and every time it needs to send a message to client X, it reuses that socket.
Lucky you, I've just written a tutorial (sample project included) on this precise problem. Using Netty! :)
Here's the link: http://bruno.linker45.eu/2010/07/15/handshaking-tutorial-with-netty/
Notice that in this solution, the server does not attempt to connect to the client. It's always the client who connects to the server.
If you were thinking about opening a socket every time you wanted to send a message, you should reconsider persistent connections as they avoid the overhead of connection establishment, consequently speeding up the data transfer rate N-fold.
I think you need to read up on sockets....
You don't really get these kinds of problems....Other than how to responsively handle both receiving and sending, generally this is done through threading your communications... depending on the app you can take a number of approaches to this.
The correct link to the Handshake/Netty tutorial mentioned in brunodecarvalho's response is http://bruno.factor45.org/blag/2010/07/15/handshaking-tutorial-with-netty/
I would add this as a comment to his question but I don't have the minimum required reputation to do so.
If you feel like reinventing the wheel and don't want to use middleware...
Design your protocol so that the other peer's answers to your requests are always easily distinguishable from requests from the other peer. Then, choose your network I/O strategy carefully. Whatever code is responsible for reading from the socket must first determine if the incoming data is a response to data that was sent out, or if it's a new request from the peer (looking at the data's header, and whether you've issued a request recently). Also, you need to maintain proper queueing so that when you send responses to the peer's requests it is properly separated from new requests you issue.
First let me explain the data flow I need
Client connects and registers with server
Server sends initialization JSON to client
Client listens for JSON messages sent from the server
Now all of this is easy and straightforward to do manually, but I would like to leverage a server of some sort to handle all of the connection stuff, keep-alive, dead clients, etc. etc.
Is there some precedent set on doing this kind of thing? Where a client connects and receives JSON messages asynchronously from a server? Without using doing manual socket programming?
A possible solution is known as Comet, which involves the client opening a connection to the server that stays open for a long time. Then the server can push data to the client as soon as it's available, and the client gets it almost instantly. Eventually the Comet connection times out, and another is created.
Not sure what language you're using but I've seen several of these for Java and Scala. Search for comet framework and your language name in Google, and you should find something.
In 'good old times' that would be easy, since at the first connection the server gets the IP number of the client, so it could call back. So easy, in fact, that it was how FTP does it for no good reason.... But now we can be almost certain that the client is behind some NAT, so you can't 'call back'.
Then you can just keep the TCP connection open, since it's bidirectional, just make the client wait for data to appear. The server would send whatever it wants whenever it can.... But now everybody wants every application to run on top of a web browser, and that means HTTP, which is a strictly 'request/response' initiated by the client.
So, the current answer is Comet. Simply put, a JavaScript client sends a request, but the server doesn't answer for a looooong time. if the connection times out, the client immediately reopens it, so there's always one open pipe waiting for the server's response. That response will contain whatever message the server want's to send to the client, and only when it's pertinent. The client receives it, and immediately sends a new query to keep the channel open.
The problem is that HTTP is a request response protocol. The server cannot send any data unless a requests is submitted by the client.
Trying to circumvent this by macking a request and then continously send back responses on the same, original, requests is flawed as the behavior does not conform with HTTP and it does not play well with all sort of intermediaries (proxies, routers etc) and with the browser behavior (Ajax completion). It also doesn't scale well, keeping a socket open on the server is very resource intensive and the sockets are very precious resources (ordinarly only few thousand available).
Trying to circumvent this by reversing the flow (ie. server connects to the client when it has somehting to push) is even more flawed because of the security/authentication problems that come with this (the response can easily be hijacked, repudiated or spoofed) and also because often times the client is unreachable (lies behind proxies or NAT devices).
AFAIK most RIA clients just poll on timer. Not ideal, but this how HTTP works.
GWT provides a framework for this kind of stuff & has integration with Comet (at least for Jetty). If you don't mind writing at least part of your JavaScript in Java, it might be the easier approach.