Re: {bb} BBDISPLAY optimization?

["PAUL WILLIAMSON" <pwilliamson@mandtbank.com>]

I have a mixture of AIX and linux boxen.  The AIX boxen 
have a mix of problems, and I've *NEVER* been able to get 
LARRD  working, even though I've got everything else working 
ok.  I think when I went down that path I found the problem to 
be with the RRD perl module.  The DISPLAY is an AIX machine, 
as well as the one BBNET server, both of which I'm having 
problems with.  The linux machines I have are happily running 
along without issue.

The load on the display box (p610, 512mb ram) is typically around 
1.0.  The load on the one BBNET box is typically ~3.5.  I may go 
ahead and apply bbgen only on the display server.  It sounds 
like it is fairly harmless.

Throughout all this, I realized that pinging always works.  It's all 
the other network/port tests that turn purple.  

I'm still having the problem with the display, but I think the 
bbnet issue is solved.  It turns out that of the 20 or so dns servers 
we have on our network, about 40% of them could not resolve 
themselves.  We are in the midst of a dns changeover, so 
I think this is probably a related issue.  I removed the dns 
test fro mthe devices that can't resolve themselves and all 
seems to be ok.

Thanks for all the replies.

Paul

>>> henrik-bb@hswn.dk 8/31/2004 12:23:43 PM >>>
In "PAUL WILLIAMSON" <pwilliamson@mandtbank.com> writes:

[sad tale about performance of BB]

What operating system are you running on these boxes ? The Solaris
boxes I use at work need to have a parameter tuned to handle
the flood of incoming BB status messages. I run this from a
startup-script:
  /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_time_wait_interval 30000
(see http://www.sean.de/Solaris/soltune.html for an explanation).
Without this the process-table just fills up with bbd-processes,
and it stops accepting new connections from the network-tester and
the clients.

Putting bbvar/logs/ on a ram-disk can also useful, if you have enough
RAM for it - at least on Solaris.


>I am trying to hold off installing bbgen until 3.0 is released, but
>I'd really rather get the stock bb working rather than put another
>piece on top to potentially mask the problem further.

While I understand that - and even encourage it in the bbgen INSTALL
docs - this might be the situation where trying out bbgen in your
setup could be worthwhile.

For the BBDISPLAY server, you can definitely install bbgen 2.16.
There will be no BBDISPLAY-related changes from 2.16 -> 3.0, so you
will get essentially the same code running whether you install now, or
you wait until 3.0 is released.

It's safe to try it out - you need not use any of the fancy stuff from
the beginning, so you can just drop bbgen onto the BBDISPLAY server
and see if it makes life easier for that server. It does sound as if
it has problems keeping up with the incoming messages; what's the load
on this box ?

For a really minimum install of bbgen on a BBDISPLAY-only server,
download bbgen, run "./configure; make bbgen", copy the bbgen
executable to $BBHOME/bin/, save the old $BBHOME/bin/bb-display.sh
script and replace it with the bb-display.sh.SAMPLE script that ships
with bbgen. You don't need any additional libraries like curl or
openssl for that. If it works, keep that setup; if it breaks, move the
old bb-display.sh script back in place and you are back where you
started.


For the BBNET server, even bbgen 2.16 should speed things up
considerably. It should be easier to install 3.0 since it no longer
needs the CURL library (2.x does - that is the reason for the major
version number change) and 3.0 will run your tests faster than 2.x,
but still - if you have a BBNET server that cannot handle the load,
then bbgen's network tester will help regardless of what version
you choose to run.


Henrik
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