Submitted by kpturner on Mon, 07/04/2011 - 00:00
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IceBreak

Hello,

Over the last week or so one of our customers have been performing stress tests to compare Icebreak with Apache.

You and I know that the Renaissance/Icebreak implementation is not able to use Icebreak in the most efficient way possible (MULTITHREAD).  We are currently restricted to MULTIPROC.  The upshot of this seems to be that under normal/medium load Icebreak is responding on a par with Apache, but under extreme load the Apache server seems to cope better than Icebreak. 

Naturally this is of concern to them.  They want something like Icebreak because they hope the support will be better than IBM provide with Apache, but they don’t want better support at the expense of poorer performance. I am on site in Cologne at the moment and have given them some assurances that we can address this – but in reality I am not sure how.  The reason that I cannot use MULTITHREAD at the moment appears to be that it doesn’t cope with the multiple asynchronous requests that Renaissance does frequently. The requests run synchronously and that negates any performance gains with MULTITHREAD.  The MULTIPROC methods solves this, but there is a large overhead when each new job starts to service increasing demand.

Niels mentioned a potential solution that allows me to specify in the query string the mode that I can use, so I can use Icebreak efficiently and asynchronously at the same time.  Is there any news on that?  Also, in MULTIPROC mode, is there any way to prestart some jobs so save on the start up overhead?

Any help gratefully received.

Regards,

Kevin

Niels Liisberg

Mon, 07/04/2011 - 00:00

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Hi Kevin;
 
We are currently working on hybrid solution to gain benefits from both worlds. Basically it is letting CGI-programs run in multi-threading mode with a pool of jobs to handle the application server part of it. This, however takes quite some time to implement.

The good news is the multithreading is around 6-7 times faster ( or rather requires 6-7 times less system ressources) that multi-proc. So we will expect a performance boost in the new version.

We are in the middle of vacation time, so when we are ready to ship it is a good question, but hopefully you can have a release primo august..

Best regards,

Niels Liisberg