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I'm trying to configure Varnish in front of Drupal, and am just running some quick Apache Bench tests to see what sort of improvement I'm getting.

The specific ab command I'm running is: ab -n 15000 -c 300 -k -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' www.mysite.tld/some-page

Once I set concurrency higher than 300 or so, I start to see a real long tail on results:

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      2
  66%      4
  75%      4
  80%      5
  90%      7
  95%     19
  98%     45
  99%    246
 100%   5016 (longest request)

This long tail gets worse and worse as the concurrency goes up, but always seems to occur after 95% of connections (give or take).

For the same ab command as but with c at 500:

  50%      1
  66%      1
  75%      1
  80%      2
  90%      5
  95%     22
  98%    365
  99%   5060
 100%   5061 (longest request)

For c=1000:

  50%      1
  66%      1
  75%      2
  80%      2
  90%      5
  95%     39
  98%   5061
  99%  27867
 100%  27885 (longest request)

I've changed these Varnish settings:

thread_pool_add_delay      1 [milliseconds]
thread_pool_max            5000 [threads]
thread_pool_min            500 [threads]

Both the varnish machine and the machine I'm using for testing are on the same subdomain, and are in fact both virtual machines on the same vmsphere. Using siege shows a similar pattern.

Why is there this long tail? How can I get rid of it?

EDIT I see these messages in dmesg while benchmarking:

[1469125.946204] TCP: Possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
[1469203.735802] TCP: Possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
[1469276.171367] TCP: Possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.

And I'll often see interesting things with sockets:

$ netstat -ant | grep 80 | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
      1 TIME_WAIT
      2 LISTEN
    257 ESTABLISHED
    437 CLOSE_WAIT

While benchmarking, usually it'll fly through requests 0 - 13500, then go very, very slow, only sometimes making it to 15000. If it doesn't make it, then connections go to CLOSE_WAIT - presumably because Apache Bench times out, so the socket isn't actually closed. But while waiting, there's usually a whole bunch of sockets just waiting at ESTABLISHED.

Is there something going on where the kernel is sending back syn cookies, which is somehow making my clients time out and try again?

EDIT 2

Although it's probably a terrible idea in practice, I did try disabling syn cookies:

sysctl -n net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 0

This provides a significantly better result - for c=1000, n=25000, the results look virtually the same as c=500, n=15000 above.

However, I've also come to realize that if I'm serving 3k requests/sec, then I'll actually be really close to hitting the limit of my outbound network pipe. So, I'll probably set my net parameters back to their defaults and not worry too much about my benchmark results. But I remain very curious about a) why syn cookies would cause this slowdown, when there's plenty of cpu on both machines and b) why, even with syn cookies disabled, I still see a similar result, just with higher c and n values.

2 Answers 2

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I cannot see a problem with your benchmark result:

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      2
  66%      4
  75%      4
  80%      5
  90%      7
  95%     19
  98%     45
  99%    246
 100%   5016 (longest request)

It means that 90% of all requests (or 13,500 of 15,000 requests) will be served within 7 ms.

I assume that the remaining 10% are requests that have been passed to the back-end (first time hit or updates). If a request has to be passed to the back-end you do not benchmark Varnish's performance but the performance of the back-end (e.g. Apache & mod_php).

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  • Understood. But watching varnishlog -b does not seem to reflect this - it shows no requests at all to the backend. May 14, 2012 at 22:43
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It's likely because you are not benchmarking varnish at all, but are benchmarking for instance the CPU, the scheduler or threading model of your operating system, or your virtualisation platform when several machines are using a lot of CPU. If run at pretty much the same hardware, ab and varnish might be fighting over the same resources. One of the authors of varnish has a nice writeup about benchmarking varnish, and ab is most likely not a useful tool: http://kly.no/posts/2012_04_19_Testing_Varnish.html

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  • If that's the case, then how should I check that the problem is the CPU instance? Watching Top shows the CPU never going above 60%. And if I run ab from a separate physical box, then I see the same results (though slower). So I don't think I'm looking at the virtual machines fighting over the same resources. May 11, 2012 at 21:36

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