Oracle iPlanet Web Proxy Server 4.0.14 Performance Tuning, Sizing, and Scaling Guide

Using Busy Functions

The default busy function returns a "503 Service Unavailable" response and logs a message depending upon the log level setting. You might want to modify this behavior for your application. You can specify your own busy functions for any NSAPI function in the obj.conf file by including a service function in the configuration file in this format:

busy="my-busy-function"

For example, you could use this sample service function:

Service fn="send-cgi" busy="service-toobusy"

This function allows different responses if the server become too busy in the course of processing a request that includes a number of types (such as Service, AddLog, and PathCheck). Note that the busy function applies to all functions that require a native thread to execute when the default thread type is non-native.

To use your own busy function instead of the default busy function for the entire server, you can write an NSAPI init function that includes a func_insert call as shown below:

extern "C" NSAPI_PUBLIC int my_custom_busy_function
(pblock *pb, Session *sn, Request *rq);
my_init(pblock *pb, Session *, Request *){func_insert
("service-toobusy", my_custom_busy_function);}

Busy functions are never executed on a pool thread, so you must be careful to avoid using function calls that could cause the thread to block.

Two other considerations are footprint and promptness. Footprint is the working size of the JVM process, measured in pages and cache lines. Promptness is the time between when an object becomes dead, and when the memory becomes available.

This is an important consideration for distributed systems. A particular generation size makes a trade-off between these four metrics. For example, a large young generation likely maximizes throughput, but at the cost of footprint and promptness.