Gallery website: switched from eAccelerator to APC

[Bharat Mediratta]

Just a heads up that today I switched gallery.menalto.com from
eaccelerator-0.9.5+r251 over to php-apc 3.0.19-2.  I found that routing
in Gallery 3 was not working properly with eaccelerator and it's a
little tedious to maintain our own custom built version of eAccelerator.
  I haven't seen any issues with APC yet, but if you notice any new
oddities on the site, please report back to me ASAP and I'll put
eAccelerator back while we figure it out.

-Bharat


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[Bharat Mediratta]

Bharat Mediratta wrote:
> Just a heads up that today I switched gallery.menalto.com from
> eaccelerator-0.9.5+r251 over to php-apc 3.0.19-2.  I found that routing
> in Gallery 3 was not working properly with eaccelerator and it's a
> little tedious to maintain our own custom built version of eAccelerator.
>   I haven't seen any issues with APC yet, but if you notice any new
> oddities on the site, please report back to me ASAP and I'll put
> eAccelerator back while we figure it out.

FYI, I've had reports of performance anomalies.  The characteristic I'm
seeing is that connections to gallery.menalto.com take up to 3 seconds.
 I believe that this is unrelated to the eaccelerator -> APC conversion
(although I used this as an opportunity to feed APC some more ram and do
some other tuning tricks).  I'm tracking this down now.

-Bharat

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[Rasmus Lerdorf]

Bharat Mediratta wrote:

> Bharat Mediratta wrote:
>> Just a heads up that today I switched gallery.menalto.com from
>> eaccelerator-0.9.5+r251 over to php-apc 3.0.19-2.  I found that routing
>> in Gallery 3 was not working properly with eaccelerator and it's a
>> little tedious to maintain our own custom built version of eAccelerator.
>>   I haven't seen any issues with APC yet, but if you notice any new
>> oddities on the site, please report back to me ASAP and I'll put
>> eAccelerator back while we figure it out.
>
> FYI, I've had reports of performance anomalies.  The characteristic I'm
> seeing is that connections to gallery.menalto.com take up to 3 seconds.
>  I believe that this is unrelated to the eaccelerator -> APC conversion
> (although I used this as an opportunity to feed APC some more ram and do
> some other tuning tricks).  I'm tracking this down now.

It would be interesting to see where in the request the delay is.

Also, keep an eye on your Cache full count.  That should be staying at 0
or very close to zero.  If it doesn't, then there could be a slight
cleanup delay, although it should be nowhere close to 3 seconds.  It
used to be quite slow, but I gave up on the complicated cache cleanup
and just used a sledgehammer now and instantly dump the entire cache and
force it to repopulate itself.  Much quicker, but if you have your cache
size set too low and it fills up right away again you will obviously
have issues.  That's why the Cache full count is important.

As a reference, here is the apc.php info from www.php.net:

http://www.php.net/~rasmus/apc.php

A bit over a billion hits in the 3 months since I last restarted Apache
on that box.  We do a pretty good job redirecting traffic to closer
mirror sites which is why the number of hits is so low.

-Rasmus

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[Bharat Mediratta]

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> It would be interesting to see where in the request the delay is.

I'm seeing similar behaviour to other boxes in our colo so I'm guessing
that the delay is happening at our QoS server (which has been acting up
a bit lately).  When I run from within the colo I don't see the delay
characteristics at all.

> Also, keep an eye on your Cache full count.  That should be staying at 0
> or very close to zero.  If it doesn't, then there could be a slight
> cleanup delay, although it should be nowhere close to 3 seconds.  It
> used to be quite slow, but I gave up on the complicated cache cleanup
> and just used a sledgehammer now and instantly dump the entire cache and
> force it to repopulate itself.  Much quicker, but if you have your cache
> size set too low and it fills up right away again you will obviously
> have issues.  That's why the Cache full count is important.

Thanks for the info.  I assume that the cache size is wholly controlled
by the shared memory segment size?  I'll keep a careful eye on that
counter.  Right now we're tracking 220+ cache hits/second and a 99.9%
hit rate so it seems to be running smoothly.

> As a reference, here is the apc.php info from www.php.net:
>
> http://www.php.net/~rasmus/apc.php
>
> A bit over a billion hits in the 3 months since I last restarted Apache
> on that box.  We do a pretty good job redirecting traffic to closer
> mirror sites which is why the number of hits is so low.

That makes sense, thanks for sharing.  I notice that you've got 37+%
memory fragmentation there.  Is this normal?

The connection issue seems to have subsided, so perhaps it was just a
network oddity.  We seem to be running stably with APC now.  Thanks,
Rasmus-- I'm much happier tracking something that I can easily update
with a package and don't have to recompile every time I update PHP :-)

-Bharat

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[Brandon Sussman-3]

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I am testing G3alpha4. It looks nice. The upload issues I am having seem to surround the attempt to upload a file format that g3 is not happy with.

I used a file called favicon.ico, which does seem to be an invalid file type. I am not debating whether .ico should be allowed, only that the error handling seems to be variable.

I was not very methodical in my test cases but:

Depending on where I am, and how much I test it, behavior differs. For instance, starting from the options tab when in album: thrown out (logged off), starting from add photo from album block: the window becomes non-responsive (never returns).

I think early in my testing, entering a browse window from the add photos to gallery, select photos button did not limit me to only photos and movies but then started to. The add photo from album block never limits. Of course, if I know the name of the file, I can type it in. This is the only time it seemed to catch and properly chastise me (invalid file type).

The cancel all button doesn't close the popup and return me to the main window. This seems like the behavior I would expect. The cancel link (not a button like 'Upload' right next to it) in the 'add photo to albumname' popup does.

The install was vary easy - nice. I wish it had allowed me to place the photo store in a place outside mt web root.

Adding an album works.

Changing account info works.

The UI is very very nice - spartan but serviceable.

Platform Information from the dashboard: (be nice if copy/paste worked, instead of the move block function):

* Operating System: Linux
* Apache: Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-3ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.6.2 mod_ruby/1.2.6 Ruby/1.8.7(2008-08-11) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
* PHP: 5.2.6-3ubuntu4.1
* MySQL: 5.0.75-0ubuntu10
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[Bharat Mediratta]

Brandon Sussman wrote:
> I am testing G3alpha4. It looks nice. The upload issues I am having seem
> to surround the attempt to upload a file format that g3 is not happy with.

Hi, Brandon.  Glad to see you testing G3!  Please use a nightly build,
not alpha 4.  We've closed over 50 tickets since A4 was released and
fixed at least some of the issues you're reporting below.

> I used a file called favicon.ico, which does seem to be an invalid file
> type. I am not debating whether .ico should be allowed, only that the
> error handling seems to be variable.
>
> I was not very methodical in my test cases but:
>
> Depending on where I am, and how much I test it, behavior differs. For
> instance, starting from the options tab when in album: thrown out
> (logged off), starting from add photo from album block: the window
> becomes non-responsive (never returns).

Ah, there's a discrepancy there in that we were allowing you to use the
old upload method if you selected "add a photo" under the additional
options section of the quick pane.  I've fixed that in r20878 so now we
only use the simple uploader.  With that uploader, you cannot select
.ico files.  (As you noticed, if you type in a filename by hand that has
a disallowed extension, it gives an "Invalid file type" error.  This is
as expected.)

> The cancel all button doesn't close the popup and return me to the main
> window. This seems like the behavior I would expect. The cancel link
> (not a button like 'Upload' right next to it) in the 'add photo to
> albumname' popup does.

I filed a ticket for that.  I'll leave it to the usability guys to make
a call on it.  http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/291

> The install was vary easy - nice. I wish it had allowed me to place the
> photo store in a place outside mt web root.

If you place the photo store outside the web root, you won't see any
thumbnails or resizes.  Gallery3 links directly to thumbs/resizes for
performance.

> Platform Information from the dashboard: (be nice if copy/paste worked,
> instead of the move block function):

I filed a ticket for the cut and paste issue.  You *can* cut and paste
by double-clicking a word and dragging, but we should try to make that
easier:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/292

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[luckystar09]

Interesting thought, i completely agree with your perspective...

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