Pierangelo Masarati wrote:
I'd like to mention a different scenario, where proxy databases need to deal with a mix of slow and fast targets. What we experienced is that concurrency can be heavily penalized by this sort of mix of targets when few threads are available, because inevitably operations affecting slow targets eat up resources that remain idle in ldap_result() while they could be used to deal with fast target related operations, while now they have to remain pending. In some cases, we had to use up to 128 threads (we even experimented with 512) with big waste of system resources.
A solution could be to redesign the proxies so that request and response are handled independently by different threads, using "client" connections that detect activities on persistent connection handlers towards the targets. Together with a customer, we quickly prototyped something like this (back-aldap, standing for "asynchronous ldap"), which is just a toy right now, but it showed some potential.
In the meanwhile, I'd like slapd to maintain as much efficiency as possible when running with lots of threads.
One of the things I've been considering is to extend the thread pool manager to keep track of how often a particular thread cycles through the pool. This would allow us to differentiate long-running operation threads from the cheaper/faster operations. Then we could automatically spawn a new thread to compensate for long-running operations monopolizing an existing thread. (The long-running thread can just exit when it finally completes.) The net effect would be that we would have a target number of configured threads X, and up to 2X if there are X slow operations running at once.