Rails app connection pool size, avoiding max pool size issues

Question

I am running a JRuby on Rails application. I see a lot of this randomly in my logs:

The max pool size is currently 5; consider increasing it

I understand I can increase the max pool size in my configuration to address this. The problem I'm looking to address is to understand what the optimal number should be. I am trying to avoid contention issues for connections. Clearly setting this number to something obnoxiously large will not work either.

Is there a general protocol to follow to know your apps optimal pool size setting?

Answer 1

From here,

The optimum size of a thread pool depends on the number of processors available and the nature of the tasks on the work queue. On an N-processor system for a work queue that will hold entirely compute-bound tasks, you will generally achieve maximum CPU utilization with a thread pool of N or N+1 threads.

For tasks that may wait for I/O to complete -- for example, a task that reads an HTTP request from a socket -- you will want to increase the pool size beyond the number of available processors, because not all threads will be working at all times. Using profiling, you can estimate the ratio of waiting time (WT) to service time (ST) for a typical request. If we call this ratio WT/ST, for an N-processor system, you'll want to have approximately N*(1+WT/ST) threads to keep the processors fully utilized.

Processor utilization is not the only consideration in tuning the thread pool size. As the thread pool grows, you may encounter the limitations of the scheduler, available memory, or other system resources, such the number of sockets, open file handles, or database connections.

So profile your application, if your threads are mostly cpu bound, then set the thread pools size to number of cores, or number of cores + 1. If you are spending most of your time waiting for database calls to complete, then experiment with a fairly large number of threads, and see how the application performs.