Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

[Steve Wood]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

That is really great to hear Bruce - the performance and the customer qualifying you with IIS and AD. That is what we are all looking for - larger clients, which typically come with IT requirement for both standardization elements and performance.

Would you let me hit your server (after your user's hours) with the same test I hit my IIS installation so I can compare. That would go a long way to help find a baseline. My server is a single VM machine with 4 cores and 4GB memory. I would share performance stats with everyone.

All - I am in the process of putting a webform over at www.iadn.com for anyone to go register their performance stats for regular Alpha server, IIS, and Cloud along with machine and environment specs. Once we get 10+ records it should start to show some useful metrics. The name of the game is to get the best performance for the least hardware and administrative hassle.

[kiwibruce]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

That is really great to hear Bruce - the performance and the customer qualifying you with IIS and AD. That is what we are all looking for - larger clients, which typically come with IT requirement for both standardization elements and performance.

Would you let me hit your server (after your user's hours) with the same test I hit my IIS installation so I can compare. That would go a long way to help find a baseline. My server is a single VM machine with 4 cores and 4GB memory. I would share performance stats with everyone.

All - I am in the process of putting a webform over at www.iadn.com for anyone to go register their performance stats for regular Alpha server, IIS, and Cloud along with machine and environment specs. Once we get 10+ records it should start to show some useful metrics. The name of the game is to get the best performance for the least hardware and administrative hassle.

Hi Steve,

Testing maybe a bit difficult on a couple of the servers as they are Intranet sites so behind VPNs etc and not open to the outside world holy I have a tough time getting into one of them I end up going on site as it is simpler :). But our ISP server that serves up a couple of Apps is accesable.
Throw me an email and we can discuss, Always happy to do what ever I can to expand the IIS knowledge base.
Bruce

[Steve Wood]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

We need to establish what is acceptable response time, and what we mean by "massive number of users". We need a couple standard scenarios, like "2600 users evenly over 5 minutes with under 6 seconds response time", etc. ONce we have that, we can all test our setups to see what we need in terms of setup and hardware, memory and such to achieve each scenario.

[DaveM]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

my thought right now, of course at 70, that could all change in 30 minutes.
response time < 3 seconds after page open of <2 seconds
massive numbers =>100 1 minute for hits and 200+ users at any time

[clami]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Hary,

Seems like everyone's answer is spend more money, but your post says money is tight. So, without more money, what can you do?
First, make each login as fast as possible. Try to get each user on, logged in and signed off as quickly as they can.
Second, make the login component as lightweight as possible. Don't use images or grids. Use a simple CSS and Viewbox.
Third, if any money is available, add more memory to the server and add another instance.
Fourth, try to spread out the logins if you can with some people asked to login earlier and allowing others to log in late, say 10 minutes early and 10 minutes late.

Good luck!

hello pat, i have same problem with app is getting slow and i want to add more memory on my server can you tell me how much memory that i have to add into my server ?

*i have 1 server and it contain sql server and alpha server, for now i'm using 16GB memory but it getting so slow for input and loading form with 80 user.

any suggestion for my problem can be help

[Steve Wood]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

It is not necessarily a memory issue. More than likely you would benefit immediately by running 'multiple instances' of Alpha.

[clami]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

It is not necessarily a memory issue. More than likely you would benefit immediately by running 'multiple instances' of Alpha.

but when it start to using a process my sql server get 100% processing time and eat all memory that i have and my app getting very slow. Btw can you tell me about 'Multiple Instance' ? or thread which telling about it ? i still not understand about multiple instance. Thanks

[lgrupido]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Multiple instances means that you run Alpha server on the same server many times. Each instance runs in it's own memory and uses a different port. So you will run Alpha on Port 80, for instance, but then run another instance on Port 81 and another on port 82.

With a load balance also installed, the load balancer can then be used to direct incoming calls to the port with the least number of concurrent users.

Or, you can simply access the different instances directly by saying:

http://mywebsite.com:81 (I forget the exact code to use, but you can direct the browser to use a different port.)

With each instance, you would assign a core on the server to help run that instance - so you generally want to do this on a multi-core machine.

You can run up to 4 instances of Alpha using the same license on the same machine.

If you have so many users that even that doesn't help, then you can install Alpha on more than 1 server (which requires extra licenses) and load balance among the separate servers also.

[clami]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Multiple instances means that you run Alpha server on the same server many times. Each instance runs in it's own memory and uses a different port. So you will run Alpha on Port 80, for instance, but then run another instance on Port 81 and another on port 82.

With a load balance also installed, the load balancer can then be used to direct incoming calls to the port with the least number of concurrent users.

Or, you can simply access the different instances directly by saying:

http://mywebsite.com:81 (I forget the exact code to use, but you can direct the browser to use a different port.)

With each instance, you would assign a core on the server to help run that instance - so you generally want to do this on a multi-core machine.

You can run up to 4 instances of Alpha using the same license on the same machine.

If you have so many users that even that doesn't help, then you can install Alpha on more than 1 server (which requires extra licenses) and load balance among the separate servers also.

sorry for coming late thank you soo much for your explanation Larry, but i have a question.. what a purpose doing multiple instance afterall if it doesnt help for so many user ? or can you tell me how much "so many users" that you said ? thanks

*sorry for my bad english

[Steve Wood]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Masagus,

You should not have such a problem even with 80 users on your form with one instance (assuming not all 80 are hitting the Submit button at the same time). Can you describe this form; is it using a UX or a Grid, is it saving to a single table or to something more complex? Or, can you upload your component for others to take a look?

Also, to add to what Larry posted - you can also run your multiple instances on different IP address, all to the same port (like all to port 80, but using different IP addresses for each instance), and technically you can run as many instances as your memory will allow on a single machine with no regard to the number of cores on that machine.

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Here is some data from our server.
We are running 7 instances of Alpha Web Server and according to AlwaysUp, they each peak out each day at about 350 MB, or about 2.5 GB. I restart nightly and that resets each instance to about 50 MB.
We produce lots of reports so each instance will spin off up to 4 instances for the reports.
We are running MariaDB with both Aria and Innodb engines and that consumes a steady about 2 GB.
The other big memory user is the DNS server which consumes 1.6 GB
Our server has 56GB of memory, and at this moment with everything that is running, it is using about 26 GB or about 50%
Our server has 24 cores, so each instance of Alpha gets its own core and the database, anti-virus and operating system share the rest.
We reserve port 80 for our clients and there are usually 4 or 5 of them on the server at any one time.
The other 6 instances are for internal use for 15 employees, all but 3 of which are on the internal LAN. Most of them have 2 or more browsers open and are using the application full time. The other three are connected with remote desktop and are using the application but are also programming.
Our main application is in a UX component with 7 embedded components and 8 embedded tabbedUIs.
Our internet connection is 100MB and this is often the pacing factor.
When everything is running all out, sometimes it gets slow.

[asawyer13]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Pat, how many people are actually going thru the internet to get to your app? Also you say 100MB, want to confirm, do you mean 100 gigabit, or 100 megabit?

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

Alan, we typically have 8 or 9 people going through the internet. The rest are running through the LAN connecting to the Alpha web app. Yes, I mean 100 MB using Shaw Cable in Canada. We upload a lot of documents and photos (we have about 400,000 photos on our server) for our projects, and we print and download a lot of 30 page reports...close to 1000 per day.

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

AlphaCloud is even more "cloudy". How do we know anything about performance there (bang for the buck)?

That was a big deal during this past DevCon. Kurt & Selwyn gave a couple of presentations on it. But like IIS role-out, it seems to be going very slowly. They did say Alpha Cloud will not be hosting data, only the app server. What everyone wants to know is the price point. That's the make or break of it. If it is not competitive it may only work for a few.

[lgrupido]

Re: Massive Number of Users Login Concurrently

If they don't host the data, then won't you be going across domains to get to your data? I can see how they could then give you proper resources for the Alpha Server, but how can they guarantee a good point to point connection to the data?

It seems like you'd be trading one issue for another ...