Trying to set up split client load over mutiple servers.

Thu May 27 23:32:23 CEST 2010

Sorry if this post gets a bit long, I've read thru the man pages and the
archives and have failed to reach understanding and need some help.

I have over 4300 Hobbit 4.2.0+all-patches clients currently reporting to
one server running Xymon  4.3.0-0.beta2. This server is also used for
other workloads, which normally do not produce much of a load but can at
times. 

We are adding more clients to this configuration at rate of about
400/week for a final total of about 7200 clients.

As of this week it seems that my Xymon server is unable to keep up with
the load and I suspect this is due to several reasons: the large number
of clients, file system type (ext3) used for the data/.. directories (,
the problem is.

I am trying to determine my best course to be able to handle the 7200+
clients ... 

Some options I've considered:

A)     simply split the clients over 2 or more independent Xymon servers

a.      easiest to configure

b.      lose 'single web page' overview

c.      lose combined statistics/reporting

B)     Split clients over multiple servers for data gathering/storage
and (how?) use one server to display a bb2.html page which combines all
non green from all 'data-gathering' servers

a.      Is this even possible?

C)    Some other method/configuration? Anyone on the list running this
many clients? 

a.      How did you set up your environment?

b.      What size/performance/type of system are you using for your
Xymon server?

Some of my current symptoms:

The 'top' command on the server is indicating high I/O load  (at times
%iowait > 60%).

The 'procs' column warns/alerts about missing processes; closer
examination shows that the client data received has been truncated,
usually somewhere in the 'ps' outout section.

The bb2.html page sometimes shows many 'purple' clients; the clients in
purple change (eg, a client goes purple for a while 5-30+ minutes, then
we get another message processed and the client goes green again.

In /var/log/xymon/clientdata.log, I am seeing many (2212 yesterday
alone) messages like:

2010-05-27 11:38:09 hobbitd_client: Got message 55294, expected 55277

2010-05-27 12:08:12 Flushed 7 stale messages for 0.0.0.0:0

2010-05-27 12:08:13 Flushed 43 stale messages for 0.0.0.0:0

2010-05-27 12:08:13 hobbitd_client: Got message 81190, expected 81140

2010-05-27 12:38:36 Flushed 16 stale messages for 0.0.0.0:0

2010-05-27 12:38:37 Flushed 43 stale messages for 0.0.0.0:0

2010-05-27 12:38:38 Flushed 26 stale messages for 0.0.0.0:0

2010-05-27 12:38:38 hobbitd_client: Got message 107484, expected 107399

The hobbitd page shows:

Statistics for Hobbit daemon
Up since 26-May-2010 14:55:38 (0 days, 22:00:02)

Incoming messages      :   16721697
- status               :   11146704
- combo                :    1122112

Incoming messages/sec  :        216 (average last 300 seconds)

The bbtest is taking 225 seconds to complete 

PING test completed (4390 hosts)            5005592.360761
203.397989 
TIME TOTAL
225.391564 

Hoping the group-mind can help me out,

Thanks, 

Tom

Thomas Brand 

Disclaimer: 1) all opinions are my own, 2) I may be completely wrong, 3)
my advice is worth at least as much as what you are paying for it, or
your money cheerfully refunded.

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