Performance Tuning

This section describes some recommended performance tuning configurations to optimize the ESB. It assumes that you have set up the ESB on a server running Unix/Linux, which is recommended for a production deployment.

Important

Performance tuning requires you to modify important system files, which affect all programs running on the server. We recommend you to familiarize yourself with these files using Unix/Linux documentation before editing them.
The parameter values we discuss below are just examples. They might not be the optimal values for the specific hardware configurations in your environment. We recommend you to carry out load tests on your environment to tune the ESB accordingly.

OS-Level Settings

1. To optimize network and OS performance, configure the following settings in /etc/sysctl.conf file of Linux. These settings specify a larger port range, a more effective TCP connection timeout value, and a number of other important parameters at the OS-level.

It is not recommended to use net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 1 when working with network address translation (NAT), such as if you are deploying products in EC2 or any other environment configured with NAT.

net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 30
fs.file-max = 2097152
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
net.core.rmem_default = 524288
net.core.wmem_default = 524288
net.core.rmem_max = 67108864
net.core.wmem_max = 67108864
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535

2. To alter the number of allowed open files for system users, configure the following settings in /etc/security/limits.conf file of Linux.

* soft nofile 4096
* hard nofile 65535

Optimal values for these parameters depend on the environment.

ESB-Level Settings

1. Memory allocated for the ESB can be increased by modifying $ESB_HOME/bin/wso2server.sh file.

Default setting for WSO2 ESB 4.6.0 is: -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
This can be changed for benchmarking as shown in the following example: -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m

2. Disable access logs in $ESB_HOME/repository/conf/log4j.properties file as follows.

log4j.logger.org.apache.synapse.transport.http.access=WARN

Pass-Through Transport Configurations

3. Set the following properties in <ESB_HOME>/repository/conf/passthru-http.properties file to optimize the pass-through transport.

http.socket.timeout=120000
worker_pool_size_core=400
worker_pool_size_max=500
worker_thread_keepalive_sec=60
worker_pool_queue_length=-1
io_threads_per_reactor=2
http.max.connection.per.host.port=32767
io_buffer_size=16384

Each parameter in the above configuration is described below.

Parameter Name	Description
http.socket.timeout	Maximum period of inactivity between two consecutive data packets. Given in milliseconds. Also defined as SO_TIMEOUT.
worker_pool_size_core	Initial number of threads in the worker thread pool.
worker_pool_size_max	Maximum number of threads in the worker thread pool. Specifying a maximum limit helps to avoid performance degradation that can occur due to context switching. Once this limit is reached and all the threads in the pool are busy, they will be in a BLOCKED state. In such situations an increase in the number of messages would fire the error `SYSTEM ALERT - HttpServerWorker threads were in BLOCKED state during last minute`.
worker_thread_keepalive_sec	Defines the keep-alive time for extra threads in the worker pool.
worker_pool_queue_length	Defines the length of the queue that is used to hold runnable tasks to be executed by the worker pool.
io_threads_per_reactor	Defines the number of IO dispatcher threads used per reactor.
http.max.connection.per.host.port	Defines the maximum number of connections per host port.
io_buffer_size	Size in bytes of the buffer through which data passes.

Recommended Values

http.socket.timeout:120000
worker_pool_size_core: 400
worker_pool_size_max: 500
worker_thread_keepalive_sec : Default value is 60s. This should be less than the socket timeout.
worker_pool_queue_length : Set to -1 to use an unbounded queue. If a bound queue is used and the queue gets filled to its capacity, any further attempts to submit jobs will fail, causing some messages to be dropped by Synapse. The thread pool starts queuing jobs when all the existing threads are busy and the pool has reached the maximum number of threads. So, the recommended queue length is -1.
io_threads_per_reactor : Value is based on the number of processor cores in the system. (Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors())
http.max.connection.per.host.port : Default value is 32767, which works for most systems but you can tune it based on your operating system (for example, Linux supports 65K connections).

io_buffer_size: 16384

HTTP-NIO Transport Configurations

4. PTT is the default transport used by the ESB. If you want to use the HTTP-NIO transport , comment out PPT and un-comment the HTTP-NIO transport in <ESB_HOME>/repository/conf/axis2/axis2.xml file.

5. To tune the HTTP-NIO transport performance, create a nhhtp.properties file for the ESB in the <ESB_HOME>/repository/conf directory, and configuring the socket timeout values, connection timeout values, and HTTP receiver thread pool parameters. For example,

http.socket.timeout=120000
http.socket.buffer-size=8192
http.tcp.nodelay=1
http.connection.stalecheck=0

# HTTP Listener thread pool parameters
snd_t_core=200
snd_t_max=250
snd_alive_sec=5
snd_qlen=-1
snd_io_threads=16

# HTTP Sender thread pool parameters
lst_t_core=200
lst_t_max=250
lst_alive_sec=5
lst_qlen=-1
lst_io_threads=16

Each parameter in the above configuration is described below.

Parameter Name	Description
http.socket.timeout	Maximum period of inactivity between two consecutive data packets. Given in milliseconds. Also defined as SO_TIMEOUT.
http.socket.buffer-size	Determines the size of the internal socket buffer used to retain data while receiving / transmitting HTTP messages.
http.tcp.nodelay	Determines whether Nagle's algorithm is to be used, which improves efficiency of TCP/IP networks by reducing the number of packets that need to be sent over the network.
http.connection.stalecheck	Determines whether a stale connection check is to be used. WSO2 ESB uses the following listener/sender architectural style with non-blocking IO: Client -> ESB: Non-blocking Transport Listener -> Mediation Flow -> ESB: Non-blocking Transport Sender -> Back-End.
lst_t_core	Transport Sender worker pool's initial thread count.
lst_t_max	Transport Sender worker pool's maximum thread counts.
lst_io_threads	Sender-side IO workers, which is recommended to be equal to the number of CPU cores. I/O reactors usually employ a small number of dispatch threads (often as few as one) to dispatch I/O event notifications to a greater number (often as many as several thousands) of I/O sessions or connections. Generally, one dispatch thread is maintained per CPU core.
lst_alive_sec	sender-side keep-alive seconds.
lst_qlen	Sender queue length, which is infinite by default.
snd_t_core snd_t_max snd_io_threads snd_alive_sec snd_qlen	These listener-side parameters have the same definition of their sender-side counterpart. Generally, same values of the sender-side parameters are set to listener-side parameters as well.

For examples that illustrate how to tune the performance of the ESB, go to Performance Tuning WSO2 ESB with a practical example and WSO2 ESB tuning performance with threads.