Service deployed on Tomcat crashing under heavy load - mysql

I'm having trouble with a web service deployed on Tomcat. During peak traffic times the server is becoming non response and forces me to restart the entire server in order to get it working again.
First of all, I'm pretty new to all this. I built the server myself using various guides and blogs. Everything has been working great, but due to the larger load of traffic, I'm now getting out of my league a little. So, I need clear instructions on what to do or to be pointed towards exactly what I need to read up on.
I'm currently monitoring the service using JavaMelody, so I can see the spikes occurring, but I am unaware how to get more detailed information than this as to possible causes/solutions.
The server itself is quad core with 16gb ram, so the issue doesn't lie there, more likely in the fact I need to properly configure Tomcat to be able to use this (or setup a cluster...?)
JavaMelody shows the service crashing when the cpu usage only gets to about 20%, and about 300 hits a minute. Is there any max connection limits of memory settings that I should be configuring?
I also only have a single instance of the service deployed. I understand I can simply rename the war file and Tomcat deploys a second instance. Will doing this help?
Each request also opens (and immediately closes) a connection to mySQL to retrieve data, I probably need to be sure it's not getting throttled there too.
Sorry this is so long winded and has multiple questions. I can give more information as needed, I am just not certain what needs to be given at this time!

The server has 16Gs of ram but how much memory do you have dedicated to tomcat, -Xms and -Xmx?

Related

How to reduce ping?

I've created a browser game.
I use
Server-side - Node.js
Client - html, js
Cloudflare
Servers located - US, Europe
When I play the game using a European server, my ping is about 40. But sometimes it raises up to 700/1000. How can I solve it? Should I change hosting? (currently - I use the digital ocean droplets for 5$)
The game is http://sigmally.com/
Game screenshot
Well first you need to identify what the issue is.
Check that your internet connection is not the problem. Use an alternative internet connection avoid VPNs for this check as they can slow your connection down.
Make sure you have adequate system resources to deal with the number of server requests.
For example Apache server will handle up to around 10000 clients at any one time.
Make sure you do not have an excessive amount of server requests.
Make sure that you have adequate processing power for the server. Check what percentage processing power you are using when you get long ping times.
Make sure that you have adequate RAM for the server. Check what percentage RAM you are using when you get long ping times.
Mare sure that the files you are requesting from the server are not located in a directory with thousands of other files as it will take the server longer to locate the file and serve it back to you.

Google VM Instance becomes unhealthy on its own

I have been using Google Cloud for quite some time and everything works fine. I was using single VM Instance to host both website and MySQL Database.
Recently, i decided to move the website to autoscale so that on days when the traffic increases, the website doesn't go down.
So, i moved the database to Cloud SQL and create a VM Group which will host the PHP, HTML, Image files. Then, i set up a load balancer to divert traffic to various VM Instances under VM Group.
The problem is that the Backend Service (VM Group inside load balancer) becomes unhealthy on its own after working fine for 5-6 hours and then again becomes healthy after 10-15 minutes. I have also seen that the problem can come when i run a file which is a bit lengthy with many MySQL Queries.
I checked the Health check and it was giving 200 response. During the down period of 10-15 minutes, the VM Instance is accessible from it own ip address.
Everything is same, i have just added a load balancer in front of the VM Instance and the problem has started.
Can anybody help me troubleshoot this problem?
It sounds like your server is timing out (blocking?) on the health check during the times the load balancer reports it as down. A few things you can check:
The logs (I'm presuming you're using Apache?) should include a duration along with the request status in the logs. The default health check timeout is 5s, so if your health check is returning a 200 in 6s, the health checker will time out after 5s and treat the host as down.
You mention that a heavy mysql load can cause the problem. Have you looked at disk I/O statistics and CPU to make sure that this isn't a load-related problem? If this is CPU or load related, you might look at increasing either CPU or disk size, or moving your disk from spindle-backed to SSD-backed storage.
Have you checked that you have sufficient threads available? Ideally, your health check would run fairly quickly, but it might be delayed (for example) if you have 3 threads and all three are busy running some other PHP script that's waiting on the database

Application Slow after a couple of uses

I created an application that works perfect in my computer but when I uploaded it to start server tests it becomes very slow, specially after a couple of uses (the first minutes work fine)...It even becomes unresponsive, as I move through a treetable a form should be updated from the database but stops working after a while...
I'm using an Amazon EC2 Linux server and a MySQL database...I checked if the connections to the database is what failed, but I'm using no more than 7 out of 150 max connections to the database.
Is this a common problem?
Any ideas on how to solve this?
Thanks!!!
Note: This is a copy of an internal vaadin forum thread: https://vaadin.com/forum#!/thread/4816326 ...Hope is not against the forum rules to do this...
It sounds like you may have a memory leak in your application somewhere that your computer is able to sustain, but your server is not. I would suggest trying some load testing on another machine and see what actions are causing it to spin out.
You can have a look at this SO answer to see how to do that:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/46227692/460802

Nginx Vs Apache to solve load isseu on website

So Have a web application that has 10-12 pages with many POST/ GET DB Calls. We usually have a apache crash/other problem when site traffic results to 1000 or so (concurrent users) which is very small number, we have updated server with good RAM and resources. When our system admin guy do load testing on blitz and other custom script and is suggesting to move away from Apache. Some things does not make sense to me. Like Apache is not too bad to handle few thousand of concurrent users considering we have cloudflare for caching. Here is what he suggested:
replacement of Apache+mod_fcgi with Nginx+php-fpm which can make the server handle much more users, and then test it.
or
2. For testing: Need 10-20 servers to run a scenario from. Basically, what is needed is a more complex blitz.io analogue. create one server, which takes all those hours, then just clone it in the cloud and pay for about 1 hour of testing multiplied by the number of servers needed.
Once again there are many DB calls anf HT access. ALso what makes Nginx better than apache in this case?
I would check this comparison first. Basically, nginx is event based, so it's able to handle more requests concurrently. However, as the MySQL DB seems to be the choke point here, it's very possible that nginx wouldn't solve all your problems. Perhaps moving to a NoSQL kind of database, that's better at scaling horizontally, would help (if that's feasible).

How to find out what is causing a slow down of the application?

This is not the typical question, but I'm out of ideas and don't know where else to go. If there are better places to ask this, just point me there in the comments. Thanks.
Situation
We have this web application that uses Zend Framework, so runs in PHP on an Apache web server. We use MySQL for data storage and memcached for object caching.
The application has a very unique usage and load pattern. It is a mobile web application where every full hour a cronjob looks through the database for users that have some information waiting or action to do and sends this information to a (external) notification server, that pushes these notifications to them. After the users get these notifications, the go to the app and use it, mostly for a very short time. An hour later, same thing happens.
Problem
In the last few weeks usage of the application really started to grow. In the last few days we encountered very high load and doubling of application response times during and after the sending of these notifications (so basically every hour). The server doesn't crash or stop responding to requests, it just gets slower and slower and often takes 20 minutes to recover - until the same thing starts again at the full hour.
We have extensive monitoring in place (New Relic, collectd) but I can't figure out what's wrong; I can't find the bottlekneck. That's where you come in:
Can you help me figure out what's wrong and maybe how to fix it?
Additional information
The server is a 16 core Intel Xeon (8 cores with hyperthreading, I think) and 12GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04 (Linux 3.2.4-20120307 x86_64). Apache is 2.2.x and PHP is Version 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.11.
If any configuration information would help analyze the problem, just comment and I will add it.
Graphs
info
phpinfo()
apc status
memcache status
collectd
Processes
CPU
Apache
Load
MySQL
Vmem
Disk
New Relic
Application performance
Server overview
Processes
Network
Disks
(Sorry the graphs are gifs and not the same time period, but I think the most important info is in there)
The problem is almost certainly MySQL based. If you look at the final graph mysql/mysql_threads you can see the number of threads hits 200 (which I assume is your setting for max_connections) at 20:00. Once the max_connections has been hit things do tend to take a while to recover.
Using mtop to monitor MySQL just before the hour will really help you figure out what is going on but if you cannot install this you could just using SHOW PROCESSLIST;. You will need to establish your connection to mysql before the problem hits. You will probably see lots of processes queued with only 1 process currently executing. This will be the most likely culprit.
Having identified the query causing the problems you can attack your code. Without understanding how your application is actually working my best guess would be that using an explicit transaction around the problem query(ies) will probably solve the problem.
Good luck!