[OpenIndiana-discuss] Event Ports performance

[Rakesh Vidyadharan]

Hello,

I have been trying out a few event ports based servers and libraries, and have been seeing very poor performance.  I am running the latest OI distribution.  For eg. Nginx from opencsw maxes out at about 10K pages/second on OI running on Parallels Desktop on MBP.  Apache 2.2.15 from the dev pkgs gives me about 22K pages/second (the default it works pages for both).  As a reverse proxy or fastcgi server, the performance difference is even bigger - more than 5x slower than Apache.

I tried the simple http server sample from http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-fast-web-server/ along with libev (I tried changing between select, poll and ports in his source), and got only about 400 requests/second for serving very short text from memory.  My own Poco C++ based servlet container implementation gives me about 6K requests/second serving much larger volume of data, and not from RAM.  The Poco HTTP server implementation is a traditional thread/select system.

In particular I wanted to know about a couple of items I learned from the libev documentation, and as to what the status is as relates to OI.

http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#SOLARIS_PROBLEMS_AND_WORKAROUNDS - mentions patches that need to be applied to get proper event ports performance.  The package manager did not list any patches available for my system.

The note about EVBACKEND_PORT on the same page mentions that event ports is really slow but scales very well.  I can replicate the really slow part :-)

Has anyone noticed the same type of issue with OI?  Any recommendations on patches or other settings that I can try?  Or, is it a case of nginx, libev etc. not using the event ports framework properly?  I have used only the FEN part of the event ports framework directly, but that is never going to generate large volume traffic to slow down anything.

Thanks
Rakesh