Don’t Let Load Balancers Ruin Your Holiday Business: An eCommerce site that crashes seven times during the Christmas season being down for up to five hours each time it crashes is a site that loses a lot of money and reputation. It happened to one of our customers who told this story at our annual performance conference earlier this month. Among the several reasons that led to these crashes I want to share more details on one of them that I see more often with other websites as well. Load balancers on a round-robin instead of least-busy can easily lead to app server crashes caused by heap memory exhaustion. Let’s dig into some details on how to identify these problems and how to avoid it.
The website is deployed on six Tomcats with three front-end Apache Web Servers. During peak load hours individual Tomcat instances started showing growing response times and a growing number of requests in the Tomcat processing queue. After a while these instances crashed due to out-of-memory exceptions and with that also brought down the rest of the site as load couldn’t be handled any more with the remaining servers. Figure 1 shows the actual flow of transactions through the system highlighting unevenly distributed response time in the application servers and functional errors being reported on all tiers (red-colored server icon):
read more
DIGITAL JUICE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank's!