performance issues on iAS stress/load tests

[raj sekhar]

"I recently did stress/load tests on the appServer and the results are below.
environment: HP unix 11.0/iPlanet 6.0sp1/iWS4.1/Java. The hardware: 2 cpu's of 360mHz,4G of RAM.
Java processes: 3kjs with default values.

The system after ramping up 500 users completely fails to respond.I just hangs with no activity while the kxs takes more than 100%(wierd) of one of the cpu resource.Though I can see enough memory available with top command, the appServer seems struck and I just do not understand why and how to resolve this.This may be a huge bottle neck for us if we have to go to production with such a performance drag.Will have to re-consider the decision of iPlanet.Any suggestions to improve? It will be of great help.

Our production is almost three times the test(actully 7 kjs and 12 gig for a 6 cpu machine) and 1500 users(on approximation) is not a good number for us.

Thanks
Raj"

[faisal mahmood]

I am not sure where your problem is but this is what you may try. probably you are using default Java heap memory allocation. You may modify the kjs scrips to allocate more memory using -ms and -mx options of JRE. For one of the projects this is what I did to allocate more memory.
Let us know how you go.
Faisal

[Gerry Giese]

Raj,
You might check with iPlanet, either their website or somebody 'live', but I seem to remember being told to use 2-3 kjs PER CPU. So your test machine would need 4 at a minimum. I haven't had that kind of user load yet on our systems, so I don't have any experience with this.
That is interesting thought that the kxs is the one having the problem. Have you adjusted the min/max thread count for it in the admin tool? I haven't messed with flow control or even know much about it, but that may be something you need to tune as well.
Are you using any kind of caching? Either at the server or the application level? If you can get the requests handled faster out of the kjs, maybe that would help.
Also, have you gone into 'Monitoring' in the admin tool and set up some stuff to monitor? It should be able to tell you something about what's going on. You might need to shorten the default time interval.
Good luck, and let us know how you end up getting it fixed, since we're all in the same boat with this software! If you end up dumping iPlanet, could you let us know the details on the decision?
Gerry