Re: minimum requirements and explanation about stats

Hi Gabriel,

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 02:13:12AM -0200, Gabriel Sosa wrote:
> Hola!
>
> Currently our haproxy is setup over a Intel Pentium D 930 with 2gb 667
> RAM, we are in a test stage. Running a Centos 5.3 64bits kernel 2.6
>
> haproxy was compiled with TARGET=linux26
>
> - How can I know if this is a good hardware for this. I didn't found
> any about this in the documentation.

A pentium D 3 GHz should be able to sustain about 15-20000 connections/s. With 2 GB of RAM you can support between 10000 and 40000 concurrent connections depending on build options and TCP tuning.

> - How can I calculate the maximum number of connection based on that
> hardware/OS/kernel

It's easy. Haproxy uses two buffers per connection. Each of them is 16 kB per default (I'm used to build at 8kB). So you have 32 kB of RAM used by haproxy per connection. Now the system also uses buffers for TCP sockets. Two buffers per socket = 4 buffers per haproxy connection. The minimum size is 4 kB, though the default is larger (check the middle parameter in the tcp_rmem and tcp_wmem sysctls). So in theory, with default settings, 2 GB of RAM can support 2GB/(32kB+4*4kB) = 41000 concurrent connections. Of course this is wrong since it does not take into account that the system needs some RAM to work. In practice, the TCP stack's memory is limited to what you can find in tcp_mem (in 4kB pages). If your machines will only run haproxy, you can safely set those parameters to half of your system's memory. That way you'll be limited to 1 GB for the TCP stack alone = 65536 connections, and 1 GB for haproxy alone = 32768 connections. If you rebuild it with 8kB buffer size, you'll reach 65536 connections. Once again, you should consider that not all of this memory will be dedicated to network buffers, and that if you limit yourself to 40k conns, it will be OK.

> In the other hand, how is a session considered ? I mean: If I have a
> page with 4 images (for example) should I consider this like a 5
> different sessions or just one session with 5 elements?

Without keepalive, these will be 5 short sessions. With keepalive, these will be 1-3 long sessions, depending on how the browser decides to parallelize the fetches.

> there is any
> documentation about how should I read the stats?

Not much in fact. There are just minor explanations in the config manual but that's all.

> I really enjoy this piece of software, there is any other way (like
> IRC) to have good talks ?

There's an IRC channel on freenode, though I don't know if it's regularly active or not. You'll find the link in the Contacts section of the home page.

Regards,
Willy Received on 2009/12/20 07:20