“Loomiere 2.0 teaser” reloaded

Filed under: Networking, Projects

«Update… Today this machine reached 6500+ active concurrent connections for a total traffic of 2841.19 Mbps (2778.1 output + 63.09 input) while the SSD’s were still below 20% load. Now that’s what I call serious FUN! Here are some pictures…

…end!»

Since my last post about describing the performance of Loomiere in production, quite a few things have happened. I tested a lot and found many things I would like to improve or add, I tried many hardware configurations to see what goes well with what. In short, I have a whole list of things I want to implement as soon as possible and the most important item on this list is to actually launch Loomiere to the public as soon as possible!

However, here is a quick update on the performance of Loomiere, but this time with a nice twist: it’s running on a SSD-based machine! Here are some specs:

• Intel Core I7 3GHz
• 12 GB RAM
• 6 x 256GB SSD Kingston
• 3 x 1 Gigabit Ethernet cards
• Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with 2.6.37-12-server kernel

And here are the results after only a few hours from launch (graphs follow):

• 4500+ active oncurrent connections (streams)
• 300+ MB/s of throughput (aprox. 2500 Gbps)

However, at this point we hit a wall: the mainboard or the kernel. I have to dig into this problem further, but from what I could gather so far, it seems that the mainboard or the Linux kernel can’t handle more punishment. Following are the CPU and memory graphs; it is clear that while the memory has no worries, the CPU is hogging! The problem lies somewhere between the I/O operations and the actual sending of data to the sockets (interrupts maybe?). More testing will follow regarding this issue.

Hmm… this is a deep one.

So, that’s it for now, I’m going to sleep. Good night .

Loomiere 2.0 teaser

Filed under: Networking, Projects

This article is a quick peek into how Loomiere 2.0 is (currently) serving close to 3k active streams from a single server in production which is restricted to 1.6 Gbps of bandwidth (we are currently negotiating with our ISP to raise this limitation). All these statistics represent a single machine, in real time, over a period of 12 hours, equipped as follows:

• 2 x Xeon Dual Core (with HyperThreading) at 3.2GHz
• 16 GB RAM
• 15 x 1TB HDD (7200rpm)
• 4 x 1GB NIC’s
• This system runs on Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS.

OK so here are the graphs:

• Cpu load.
• Network traffic (i.e. all interfaces cumulated).
• Active connections (i.e. concurrent streams).
• Memory usage.

The graphs may not yet be as stable as I would wish at the moment since I am still testing this setup as well as Loomiere itself, but I think soon I will have a more stable configuration and also some time to comment on these graphs.

Enjoy!