Introduction

This article describles the thundering herd problem during web development.

Table of Contents

concurrent accept system call

  • an issue with old kernel, new kernel has been fixed
  • solution
    • multi-process
    • multi-thread
      • mutex

concurrent select, poll, epoll

  • used as monitors for file descriptors
  • not an issue at all, notify all monitors are reasonable and necessary
  • solution
    • using SysV IPC semaphores
      • SysV IPC resource are limited in the system
      • SysV IPC objects are persistent resources, need manually removing
      • leakage is an issue when killall -9 apache2
      • ipcs
      • not good for app server, cause
        • app server is managed by various users
          • not like apache, which is managed by conscious sysadmin as a service
          • app server is slower and heavier
          • running as non-root user
          • sleeping processes are generally low
          • so thundering herd is not a big problems
    • suboptimal option: independent process bound on different sockets and configure nginx to round robin between them
    • optimal option: having an inter-process locking (like Apache HTTP Server) seriallizing all of accepts in both thread and processes
    • use pthread_mutex to seriallizing epoll/kqueue/poll/select use in each thread

References