Informix Experts

Introduction:

This article describes a customer’s experience with their poll thread configuration while upgrading from IDS 7.31.FD9 to IDS 10.00.FC6. This particular upgrade was related to their busiest IDS server running on an HP Superdome. Typically, one could observe upwards of at least 3000 short-lived soctcp connections on this system.

Original IDS 7.31 Configuration:

Key configuration settings that were active in the IDS 7.31 environment were initially used after upgrading to IDS 10.00:

• 23 CPU VPs
• 20 poll threads running on NET VPs
• multiple server aliases

Optimal IDS 10.00 Configuration:

An optimal configuration was ultimately determined and incorporated the following configuration settings in the IDS 10.00 server:

• 23 CPU VPs
• a handful (3-5) of poll threads running on NET VPs
• enable new IDS 10.00 ONCONFIG parameter, FASTPOLL
multiple server aliases

Relevant Testing:

Stress testing supportive of this optimal configuration was conducted on a 16-processor/32-core HP server using the latest IDS 7.31 and IDS 10.00 64 bit products. The testing involved a multi-threaded ESQL/C application that would spawn 3000 threads over 3 server aliases. Each thread would connect to the server, complete a small amount of read-only work and disconnect from the server 30 times. These 90,000 total connections mimicked the customer’s workload and considered poll threads running both on CPU VPs (inline) and on NET VPs against servers configured with 23 CPU VPs. The following chart shows results from the stress testing that were considered for the optimal customer configuration: