[Vm-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] Networking change in Pharo 1.2?

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 18:19:28 UTC 2011


Hi Henrik,

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 1:23 AM, Henrik Sperre Johansen <
henrik.s.johansen at veloxit.no> wrote:

> On 17.04.2011 22:48, Chris Muller wrote:
>
>> I was able to work on getting Magma 1.2 going in Pharo.  It was quite
>> easy to get the code loaded and functioning in Pharo 1.1.1, Pharo 1.2,
>> and Pharo 1.3.
>>
>> But something seems to have changed in Pharo's networking from 1.1.1
>> to 1.2.  All Magma functionality seems to work fine for low-volume
>> activity.  However, when the test-suite gets to the HA test cases (at
>> the end), one of the images performing heavy networking activity,
>> consistently gets very slow and bogged down for some reason; causing
>> the clients to timeout and disrupting the test suite.  Fortunately, it
>> happens in the same place in the test-suite every time.
>>
>> The UI of the image in question becomes VERY sluggish, but
>> MessageTally spyAllOn: didn't reveal anything useful.  What is it
>> doing?  I did verify that the Magma server in that image is still
>> functioning; clients were committing, but I had to increase their
>> timeouts from 10 to 45 seconds to avoid timeouts..
>>
>> Unfortunately, two days of wrangling in Pharo (because I'm an old
>> Squeak dog) I could not nail the problem down; but I have one
>> suspect..  A couple of times, I caught a process seemingly hung up in
>> NetworkNameResolver; trying to resolve an IP from 'localhost'.
>>
>> This exact set of Magma packages is rock-solid on Pharo 1.1.1 and
>> Squeak, but that doesn't mean the problem for sure lies in Pharo 1.2;
>> maybe a networking bug in 1.1.1 is allowing Magma to "misuse" the
>> network and get away with it and Pharo 1.2 is now more strict?  I
>> don't know, I would just like to ask the experts here for help who
>> know all what went into Pharo 1.2 so hopefully we can get to the
>> bottom of it.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>   Chris
>>
>>  Which VM did you run these tests on?
> IIRC, Cog has a hard limit on how many external semaphores are available,
> and each Socket consumes 3 of those.
>

Not so.  The limit is soft.  It can be accessed using Smalltalk
vmParameterAt: 49.  It defaults to 256 entries.  It maxes out it 64k entries
because the value set via vmParameterAt: 49 put: X persists in a short in
the image header.  I expect 20k sockets to be sufficient for a while, right?

So if you are running on Cog, the problem when under heavy load may be that
> there simpy aren't enough free external semaphores to create enough
> sockets...
>
> Cheers,
> Henry
>
>
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