Configuring Jetty for high request volume

Question

In our application we need to handle request volumes in excess of 5,000 requests per second. We've been told that this is feasible with Jetty in our type of application (where we must expose a JSON-HTTP API to a remote system, which will then initiate inbound requests and connections to us).

We receive several thousand inbound HTTP connections, each of which is persistent and lasts about 30 seconds. The remote server then fires requests at us as quickly as we can respond to them on each of these connections. After 30 seconds the connection is closed and another is opened. We must respond in less than 100ms (including network transit time).

Our server is running in EC2 with 8GB of RAM, 4GB of which is allocated to our Java VM (past research suggested that you should not allocate more than half the available RAM to the JVM).

Here is how we currently initialize Jetty based on various tips we've read around the web:

Server server = new Server();
SelectChannelConnector connector = new SelectChannelConnector();
connector.setPort(config.listenPort);
connector.setThreadPool(new QueuedThreadPool(5120));
connector.setMaxIdleTime(600000);
connector.setRequestBufferSize(10000);
server.setConnectors(new Connector[] { connector });
server.setHandler(this);
server.start();

Note that we originally had just 512 threads in our threadpool, we tried increasing to 5120 but this didn't noticeably help.

We find with this setup we struggle to handle more than 300 requests per second. We don't think the problem is our handler as it is just doing some quick calculations, and a Gson serialization/deserialization.

When we manually do a HTTP request of our own while it's trying to handle this load we find that it can take several seconds before it begins to respond.

We are using Jetty version 7.0.0.pre5.

Any suggestions, either for a solution, or techniques to isolate the bottleneck, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

First, Jetty 7.0.0.pre5 is VERY old. Jetty 9 is now out, and has many performance optimisations.

Download a newer version of the 7.x line at https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/previousversions.html

This following advice is documented at

• Eclipse.org / Jetty - HowTo: High Load
• Eclipse.org / Jetty - HowTo: Garbage Collection
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks

Be sure you read them.

Next, the threadpool size is for handling accepted requests, 512 is high. 5120 is ridiculous. Pick a number higher than 50, and less than 500.

If you have a Linux based EC2 node, be sure you configure the networking for maximum benefit at the OS level. (See the document titled "High Load" in the above mentioned list for details)

Be sure you are using a recent JRE/JDK, such as Oracle Java 1.6u38 or 1.7u10. Also, if you have a 64 bit OS, use the 64 bit JRE/JDK.

Set your acceptor count, SelectChannelConnector.setAcceptors(int) to be a a value between 1 and (number_of_cpu_cores - 1).

Lastly, setup optimized Garbage Collection, and turn on GC Logging to see if the problems you are having are with jetty, or with Java's GC. If you see via the GC logging that there are massive GC "stop the world" events taking lots of time, then you know one more cause for your performance issues.