Timeout at ~200 concurrent users

[shawnlehner]

Hello Everyone,

I am running Untangle as the primary router on a few servers at our colo and I am having some issues with timeouts. I am using Blitz to profile our performance and at around 200 concurrent requests the timeouts begin to appear and get much worse as the load increases. This must be a configuration issue on my end, anyone have any ideas?

Things I know:

1. During this the router shows "low" CPU usage.
2. The webserver has very minimal CPU/Disk usage.

Hardware:
The router and webserver are 2 separate servers (I am not running VM on these) but both are identical 1U servers. They are 4x2.8GHz Intel CPUs with 6GB of ram on Supermicro boards. The router is using the 2 onboard NIC provided by the board.

[dwasserman]

Whats application are in use? and how they are configured?

[sky-knight]

Web Filter, Web Filter Lite, and both AV modules are dangerous, and often disastrous to operate in front of a live web server.

Untangle's filters are by and large not direction specific. So if you've installed all the modules, and running it all via the default rack, well you're using technology designed to protect end users from the dangers of the world to protect the world from your web server. It doesn't end well.

[shawnlehner]

I am running intrusion prevention and reports right now ... I turned off attack blocker to see if that helped.

[dmorris]

attack blocker might interfere with performance tests as it will often perceive it as a DoS attack and throttle that IP back.

I'd turn it off for testing, but I would leave it on in production.

[shawnlehner]

Thanks dmorris. I turned it off and it did help with testing a little; it took me from ~120 to ~200 connections before timeouts started to climb.

[shawnlehner]

I just ran another Blitz test with the following settings:

• 250 users
• over 1 minute
• with a timeout of 5 seconds

When I run this on our fairly low end Amazon instance there is 0 timeouts/errors. When I run it on our dedicated colo server (with much higher specs) I get: 6,315 hits, 97 timeouts, 37 errors