Re: subversion tunables

On Thursday 08 Jul 2010, west alto wrote:
> Hi Gurus,
>
> Any advise on initial tuning values for apache MinSpareServers,
> MaxSpareServers, and StartServers, tcp tunings, ulimits, sysctl....
>
> I'm running svn 1.6 over apache2 pre-fork. System load goes high as
> much as 10 during heavy usage.
>
> How does mod_dav_svn works on checkout? is every file = 1 thread?
>
> What would be your recommended MaxRequestsPerChild?
>
> I'm serving 91 repositories and 2 of them are at least access every 10
> mins with 4 concurrent users.
>
> Thanks,
>
> West

I was kind of hoping to see if anyone else replied to this. I've not
personally tuned apache like this as I don't believe it to be a bottleneck in
my environment. Pointing a browser at apache's /server-status page will tell
you how many servers are actively processing requests and if you use
something like munin then that will tell you more historical information and
make it much easier to spot if any changes have positive effects.

Creating threads is pretty expensive so I'd expect (but don't take this as
correct) that mod_dav_svn uses the apache request processing thread to
perform all operations. It might be there is an extra thread created per
request so that there is one for comms and one for the actual subversion
request. Definately not one per file though.

IO wait and authentication checks seem to be the biggest problem in my
install. To reduce the number of authentication checks I disabled per
directory auth checks with the 'SVNPathAuthz off' directive. This made a big
difference to checkouts, our AD authentication servers were temporarily
blacklisting the subversion server as they were thinking it was DOS'ing them
when I was performing a test checkout! I also have a patch for mod_auth_pam
to cache some authentication details and also allow setting the name it
provides to pam.

The production installation is running on top of apache 2.0 which seems to
have a minor memory leak or is over eager with caching data. To help reduce
the impact of that there is a cron entry to gracefully restart the server 3
times a day. This doesn't seem to be an issue on apache 2.2 though as I have
an almost identical setup which doesn't suffer from that problem.

Campbell

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