EC2 ELB performance issues

Question

Two questions about EC2 ELB:

First is how to properly run JMeter tests. I've found the following http://osdir.com/ml/jmeter-user.jakarta.apache.org/2010-04/msg00203.html, which basically says to set -Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=0 when starting JMeter (which is easy) and the second point it makes is that the routing is per ip not per request. So aside from starting a farm of jmeter instances I don't see how to get around that. Any ideas are welcome, or possibly I'm mis-reading the explanation(?)

Also, I have a web service that is making a server side call to another web service in java (and both behind ELB), so I'm using HttpClient and it's MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager, where I provide some large-ish routes to host value in the connection manager. And I'm wondering if that will break the load balancing behavior ELB because the connections are cached (and also, that the requests all originate from the same machine). I can switch to use a new HttpClient each time (kind of lame) but that doesn't get around the fact that all requests are originating from a small number of hosts.

Backstory: I'm in the process of perf testing a service using ELB on EC2 and the traffic is not distributing evenly (most traffic to 1-2 nodes, almost no traffic to 1 node, no traffic at all to a 4th node). And so the issues above are the possible culprits I've identified.

Answer 1

I have had very simular problems. One thing is the ELB does not scale well under burst load. So when you are trying to test it, it is not scaling up immediately. It takes a lot of time for it to move up. Another thing that is a drawback is the fact that it uses a CNAME as the DNS look up. This alone is going to slow you down. There are more performance issues you can research.

My recommendation is to use haproxy. You have much more control, and you will like the performance. I have been very happy with it. I use heartbeat to setup a redundant server and I am good to go.

Also if you plan on doing SSL with the ELB, you will suffer more because I found the performance to be below par.

I hope that helps some. When it comes down to it, AWS has told me personally that load testing the ELB does not really work, and if you are planning on launching with a large amount of load, you need to tell them so they can scale you up ahead of time.

Answer 2

You don't say how many jmeter instances you're running, but in my experience it should be around 2x the number of AZs you're scaling across. Even then, you will probably see unbalanced loads - it is very unusual to see the load scaled exactly across your back-end fleet.

You can help (a bit) by running your jmeter instances in different regions.

Another factor is the duration of your test. ELBs do take some time to scale up - you can generally tell how many instances are running by doing an nslookup against the ELB name. Understand your scaling patterns, and build tests around them. (So if it takes 20 minutes to add another instance to the ELB pool, include a 25-30 minute warm-up to your test.) You also get AWS to "pre-warm" the ELB pool if necessary.

If your ELB pool size is sufficient for your test, and can verify that the pool does not change during a test run, you can always try running your tests directly against the ELB IPs - i.e. manually balancing the traffic.

I'm not sure what you expect to happen with the 2nd tier of calls - if you're opening a connection, and re-using it, there's obviously no way to have that scaled across instances without closing & re-opening the connection. Are these calls running on the same set of servers, or a different set? You can create an internal ELB, and use that endpoint to connect to, but I'm not sure that would help in the scenario you've described.