I have a web server based on paste.httpserver as an adapater between HTTP and WSGI. When I do performance measurements with httperf, I can do over 1,000 requests per second if I start a new request each time using --num-conn. If I instead reuse the connection using --num-call then I get about 11 requests per second, 1/100th of the speed.
If I try ab I get a timeout.
My tests are
% ./httperf --server localhost --port 8080 --num-conn 100
...
Request rate: 1320.4 req/s (0.8 ms/req)
...
and
% ./httperf --server localhost --port 8080 --num-call 100
...
Request rate: 11.2 req/s (89.4 ms/req)
...
Here's a simple reproducible server
from paste import httpserver
def echo_app(environ, start_response):
n = 10000
start_response("200 Ok", [("Content-Type", "text/plain"),
("Content-Length", str(n))])
return ["*" * n]
httpserver.serve(echo_app, protocol_version="HTTP/1.1")
It's a multi-threaded server, which is hard to profile. Here's a variation which is single threaded:
from paste import httpserver
class MyHandler(httpserver.WSGIHandler):
sys_version = None
server_version = "MyServer/0.0"
protocol_version = "HTTP/1.1"
def log_request(self, *args, **kwargs):
pass
def echo_app(environ, start_response):
n = 10000
start_response("200 Ok", [("Content-Type", "text/plain"),
("Content-Length", str(n))])
return ["*" * n]
# WSGIServerBase is single-threaded
server = httpserver.WSGIServerBase(echo_app, ("localhost", 8080), MyHandler)
server.handle_request()
Profiling that with
% python2.6 -m cProfile -o paste.prof paste_slowdown.py
and hitting it with
%httperf --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=8080 --uri=/ \
--send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=1 --num-calls=500
I get a profile like
>>> p=pstats.Stats("paste.prof")
>>> p.strip_dirs().sort_stats("cumulative").print_stats()
Sun Nov 22 21:31:57 2009 paste.prof
109749 function calls in 46.570 CPU seconds
Ordered by: cumulative time
ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename:lineno(function)
1 0.000 0.000 46.571 46.571 {execfile}
1 0.001 0.001 46.570 46.570 paste_slowdown.py:2(<module>)
1 0.000 0.000 46.115 46.115 SocketServer.py:250(handle_request)
1 0.000 0.000 44.675 44.675 SocketServer.py:268(_handle_request_noblock)
1 0.000 0.000 44.675 44.675 SocketServer.py:301(process_request)
1 0.000 0.000 44.675 44.675 SocketServer.py:318(finish_request)
1 0.000 0.000 44.675 44.675 SocketServer.py:609(__init__)
1 0.000 0.000 44.675 44.675 httpserver.py:456(handle)
1 0.001 0.001 44.675 44.675 BaseHTTPServer.py:325(handle)
501 0.006 0.000 44.674 0.089 httpserver.py:440(handle_one_request)
2001 0.020 0.000 44.383 0.022 socket.py:373(readline)
501 44.354 0.089 44.354 0.089 {method 'recv' of '_socket.socket' objects}
1 1.440 1.440 1.440 1.440 {select.select}
....
You can see that nearly all the time is in a recv.
I decided to bail on httpref and write my own HTTP/1.1-with-keep-alive request and send it using netcat:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Location: localhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0
GET / HTTP/1.1
Location: localhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0
... repeat 97 more times, to have 99 keep-alives in total ...
GET / HTTP/1.1
Location: localhost
Connection: Close
Content-Length: 0
which I sent with
nc localhost 8080 < ~/src/send_to_paste.txt
Total time for 100 requests was 0.03 seconds, so it's very good performance.
This suggests that httperf is doing something wrong (but it's a widely used and respected piece of code), so I tried 'ab'
% ab -n 100 -k localhost:8080/
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d <$Revision: 1.73 $> apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking localhost (be patient)...
Server timed out
: Operation now in progress
Instrumenting the server, it handles one request and is waiting for the second.
Any idea of what's going on?