users@grizzly.java.net

Re: Grizzly production ready? ConcurrentHandler & scenarios

From: felixx <dolaru_at_sympatico.ca>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:09:20 -0700 (PDT)

Salut et merci, I have to say you almost convinced me :-)
1. Can you share some results please, just to get an idea, not details. What
I'm trying to achieve is not so big. Let's say 5000 long poll connected
clients, 2000 sent messages/s (I.e. 1 msg sent to 2000 clients).
Is it true that their solution is close to what is considered to be added in
servlet 3.0?
If detecting when the client is not present or able to receive messages
anymore it's based on catching an IOEx when writing the response, based on
what I've seen using Tomcat, I'm not sure how well this will work. To be
really sure I would rather have a client timeout mechanism on the server to
detect disconnected clients (check when the last ping event was successfully
sent).

2. I guess I was mislead by seeing in the examples the handler being created
in doGet and by the doc saying: " ... Resume the Comet request and remove it
from the active CometHandler list. Once resumed, a CometHandler must never
manipulate the HttpServletRequest or HttpServletResponse as those object
will be recycled and may be re-used to serve another request. If you cache
them for later reuse by another thread there is a possibility to introduce
corrupted responses next time a request is made. ... "
So I should be able to cache it in client's session, attach the new Response
in the nxt poll and then add it back to the context? I'll have to check the
code to understand how it works. I think it would be useful to be able to
add the handler to the context using a custom ID. I'm wondering what happens
if I add twice the same handler instance.

3. I think this is explained in 2 now.

4. I need to understand how async http write would work. But anyway, just to
use a brutal approach, do you see a problem in having a pool of 200-300
dispatching threads just to be sure?



Jeanfrancois Arcand-2 wrote:
>
> Salut,
>
> felixx wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I'm trying to decide on a Comet server side solution. My first preference
>> would be to go GF V3 and Grizzly. However based on the existing issues
>> list
>> (475, 478, 479) I do have some concerns regarding the stability/maturity
>> of
>
> 475: bad test (just recently added, OS dependent failure)
> 478: Javascript problem (and i'm quite bad with javascript)
> 479: Maybe an issue with cometd in GF v3.
>
> So nothing related to Comet (server side) :-). We lacked internal
> testing for awhile (situation fixed now :-)). Grizzly Comet is stable
> but true some minor release 1.9.x might introduce minor regressions).
>
> If your looking at an immature but nice Comet Framework, look at
> Atmosphere.dev.java.net (shameless plug as I'm releasing 0.1 today :-))
>
>
>> the Comet implementation. Here are some questions please:
>> 1.Do you guys know/used the Grizzly Comet in a real production env. I
>> know,
>> small examples with a few clients would work but how about having 5000
>> clients and 2000 messages/s? Has anyone tested/benchmarked such a
>> scenario.
>
> That will be the topic of my javaone session this year :-) ...yes we
> have done some test with that but it really depends on the application
> itself, long poll vs http streaming, etc. We have two automated
> benchmark inside the workspace:
>
> https://grizzly.dev.java.net/nonav/xref-test/com/sun/grizzly/comet/CometUnitTest.html
>
> which can always be looked at. Of course they aren't real benchmark with
> a real application.
>
>
>> It would be unacceptable for us to have the app hanging or being
>> unreliable
>> (see the above issues) I've seen some references about GF performance but
>> I'm referring strictly to the Comet side. Not easy to say it but, and I
>> may
>> be wrong, it looks like Jetty has been used in such scenarios, worked
>> fine
>> and seems more mature in this area.
>
> Difficult to convince you here as Jetty was the first one on the market,
> and at the time GlassFish was just moving from its "zero" to its "hero"
> role :-). But the way Jetty handle suspend/resume cannot scale as every
> time you suspend, it throws an exception and your Servlet ends up being
> invoked twice. I like Jetty, but the way suspend/resume has been
> implemented cannot scale IMO and the logic needed inside a Servlet
> (double invokation) make the programming model complicated.
>
> Not only that, but with Jetty you don't have any support detecting when
> clients close connection (which can cause memory leak with some
> application because of wasted resources), something grizzly supports.
>
> Also the way information/message are pushed in Jetty has to be
> implemented by the application itself, where in Grizzly you can easily
> filter/throttle/push/cluster using the CometContext.notify() and
> NotificationHandler. This is less work to do for an application's
> developer.
>
>
>> 2.Maybe I'm missing something here but is there a way to avoid recreating
>> a
>> CometHandler every time the same client reconnects for a long pool?
>
> You don't have to recreate. Just re-add it to the list of suspended
> response (CometContext.addCometHandler())
>
> I would
>> need a ConcurrentHandler type (with the internal event queue) and seems
>> expensive to have for each poll cycle thousands of handlers being created
>> and then dropped when an event has ocurred. Why not just being able to
>> replace the embedded Response and keep the existing handler as long as
>> the
>> client is present?
>
> CometHandler.attach() is for that. But you still need to invoke
> resumeCometHandler followed by addCometHandler()
>
>
>> 3.Here's a scenario I've seen using a different 'long polling' solution.
>> Due
>> to a network condition the server is not able to push the events and
>> these
>> are accumulating in the handler's queue. (not always the server is able
>> to
>> see right away that the client is not able to receive the events). The
>> client has a mechanism to detect if ping events are received and if not
>> will
>> try again to connect. Now you will end having 2 handler for the same
>> client,
>> the old one with some events in the queue, also blocking a thread, and
>> the
>> fresh one. How can we handle this type of situations in? In a different
>> system I used just to detect the situation, replace the Response and
>> start
>> pushing the content of the queue.
>
> why do you think creating CometHandler are expensive? Event if they are
> (based on your application), you can alway use the CometHandler.attach()
> to recycle them. Did I misunderstood you?
>
>
>> 4.Even with a ConcurrentHandler you may end having a lot of threads
>> blocked
>> because of slow clients. It looks like if you expect 5000 clients it's
>> safer
>> to use let's say 400 threads to execute the handler. Any comments on
>> this?
>
> It's up to your application to either:
>
> + enable async http write in Grizzly (so no blocking thread) insid ethe
> application (grizzly internal will handle the "blocking" for you instead).
> + define a "strategy" inside NotificationHandler to detect such slow
> client and either discard them or park them inside a "queue" for later
> write.
>
> Note that the same issue will arise with Jetty :-)
>
>
>> A lot of questions, I know. Again GF & Grizzly looks very promising,
>> great
>> work so far, I'm not just sure, and I need your help to convince myself,
>> it
>> is ready for a real life application.
>
> You are welcome. We have multiples implementation inside and outside Sun
> that build on top of Comet. One of them is our internal Sun IM
> product...so there is a possibility of ~30 000 users at the same time
> using it :-)
>
> Feel free to continue the discussion if I was unclear of if I missed the
> point.
>
> A+
>
> -- Jeanfrancois
>
>
>
>
>> Thanks!
>
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