Tuning for HTTP 1.1-Style Workload

While tuning server-persistent connection handling, balancing throughput and latency is a challenge. The keep-alive poll interval and timeout control latency. Lowering the value of these settings is intended to lower latency on lightly loaded systems, for example, to reduce page load times. Increasing the values of these settings is intended to raise aggregate throughput on heavily loaded systems, for example, by increasing the number of requests per second the server can handle. However, if there is too much latency and too few clients, aggregate throughput suffers as the server sits idle unnecessarily. As a result, the general keep-alive subsystem tuning rules at a particular load are as follows:

• If there's idle CPU time, decrease the poll interval.

• If there's no idle CPU time, increase the poll interval.

Also, chunked encoding could affect the performance for HTTP 1.1 workload. Tuning the response buffer size can positively affect the performance. A higher response buffer size, set using the magnus.conf parameter, ChunkedRequestBufferSize would result in sending a Content-length: header, instead of chunking the response.

You can also set the buffer size for a Service-class function in the obj.conf file, using the UseOutputStreamSize parameter. UseOutputStreamSize overrides the value set using the output-buffer-size property. If UseOutputStreamSize is not set, Proxy Server uses the output-buffer-size setting. If the output-buffer-size is not set, Web Server uses the output-buffer-size default value of 8192.

The following example shows setting the buffer size for the nsapi_test Service function:

<Object name="nsapitest">
 ObjectType fn="force-type" type="magnus-internal/nsapitest"
 Service method=(GET) type="magnus-internal/nsapitest" fn="nsapi_test"
 UseOutputStreamSize=12288
</Object>