Hi, We're using ithreads with modperl to run some complicated robots concurrently ( in a commercial environment ) - there is however an issue.
Huge memory usage ... each ithread uses about 10M of ram ( image of Apache, image of mod perl and image of our deep-link robot ), and as we use 5 ithreads plus the original thread that means that each Apache is using 60 M and because we trade on being the best and the fastest at what we do we need to keep plenty of Apaches ready and waiting ( about 20 ) - so we're using heaps of memory. Does anybody know how we can reduce the amount of memory we use ? - is there some smart way to actually share the images. Up to now the problem has been OK because we simply paid to put 2 Gig on board, but we had nearly 1000 users yesterday and they spend about 10 minutes filling in the forms ( car insurance quote stuff ) then the robots go out and do the deep-linking and that can be up to 3 minutes ( and usually do - the sites we deep-link into can be quite slow and we make 10 - 50 requests into each site ), during which time Apache is handling a single request ! We are simply running out of memory, which is sad because we are nowhere near running out of processor and it grieves me to simply use a bigger server when it seems that smarter could solve the problem. Other than that things are working very nicely and the site serves quickly and reliably - see at www.superquote.com ( despite the warnings that ithreads is not yet safe for commercial use ). We're on a 2.4.20 Linux with Apache 1.3.28 and mod_perl 1.28 Cheers Simon -- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html
