WPE crashing under high load

[Drew Clark]

Hi,

I'm looking for numbers or experience on WPE limitations. I have a small, 4K script that does a find of a POST variable, and then writes a string into a field before invoking a javascript redirect. Upon loadtesting the script, I can only get up to about 200 simultaneous users before WPE founders, throwing 417 errors, and sometimes simply crashing.

I'm running a two machine setup. WPE is a Dual Quad Core 2.26 Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. The DB is a Dual 1.8 G5 MP with 2GB of RAM.

Neither machine peaks out the network or CPU. WPE does end up taking up "131%" in Activity Monitor, however between all the cores, none of them show much strain.

Is 200, or even 500, simultaneous connections (users) too much to expect, or are there a few things that can be tweaked to help WPE out?

Thanks in advance.

[Martin Brändle]

Yes, that's too much. The bottleneck is the AJP connector between Apache 1.3 and the Tomcat component of the WPE.

Maybe with Apache 2 it is better.

[Drew Clark]

Thanks for the info. I'm running Apache 2.2, so it must be just as bad. I take it this is something you can't just throw more resources at?

Out of curiosity, is IIS any better?

In the meantime, duplicating the data I need in a MySql table and loading it into FM through ESS is working out well so far too - and much, much quicker.