Web interface/full inventory/etc. extremely slow

[Scott Adams]

I just tried to image a computer this morning, and am unable to. It took ~ 3 minutes to run through the boot.php, init.xz, and 1 other file after choosing the image to deploy. My computer then when to a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left of the screen and it is still there.

Thoughts?

[Joe Schmitt]

@Scott-Adams with 560 clients you will definitely want to increase the client checkin time. Right now it seems to be around 1 minute (the default).

It’d also be worth while switching to php-fpm instead of Apache’s mod_php, as its better suited for more heavy PHP usage:

The main issue with mod_php and Mpm Prefork is that every time Apache forks
into a new process (every new request) the entire PHP module and all its sub
modules have to be loaded into memory along with all your other data which
means you’re wasting a lot of memory on multiple copies of the same thing.

To get around the memory usage caused by loading php into every Apache
process is to use PHP as an external resource (PHP-FPM instead of mod_php) this
then also allows you to run Apache with MPM Worker which mean Apache has
a master process (now smaller as it doesn’t include all the bloat that comes with
PHP) that spawns a small number of child processes to deal with http requests,
CSS, Images, file downloads etc allowing for faster parallel processing.

Src and a good guide for scaling PHP and Apache: https://www.wirehive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Configuring-Apache-and-PHP-for-stability-an-performance.pdf

(Tom and I both use php-fpm in our development environments, so we know it’ll work fine)

[george1421]

@joe-schmitt said in Web interface/full inventory/etc. extremely slow:

It’d also be worth while switching to php-fpm instead of Apache’s mod_php, as its better suited for more heavy PHP usage

I did some testing on this a bit ago and it helped with my install: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10717/can-php-fpm-make-fog-web-gui-fast

Activating php-fpm and memcache did seem to make FOG a bit more responsive. But also did changing the check in time to 15 minutes.

[Scott Adams]

@joe-schmitt I have followed the directions provided by @george1421 via link https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10717/can-php-fpm-make-fog-web-gui-fast/4, as well as updating to 1.5.0 stable.

php-fpm is enabled and I have changed checkin time to 15 minutes. My webui is still slow moving from page to page, as well as imaging still not working.

[george1421]

@scott-adams FWIW: Upgrading to 1.5.0 may undo the php-fpm settings you made.

Also ensure you test the info.php page and confirm the server API function is ‘FPM/FastCGI’. As outlined in step 21.

If php-fpm is running you should only see just a few apache service instances and php-fpm instances running not the 100s of apache2 instances like in your OP.

It looks like you are a bit over committed on the fog server memory (not a bad thing other than consuming more space than necessary). Tell us a bit more about your fog server.

1. Is it virtual or physical.
2. How many (v)CPUs does it have?
3. Tell us about your disk subsystem, is it raid or a single disk?
4. What about your network adapter(s), how many do you have?

[Scott Adams]

@george1421 I did the 1.5.0 update before working on the php-fpm stuff, so I should be good there.

After looking in the info.php, I am still seeing the Apache 2.0 handler. I have restarted services and server again just to try to force it, but still no go on getting FPM/FastCGI to show up.

All of the following information is the way our server has always been configured. No changes have been made and it has worked just fine in the past. This is a virtual box, running on Hyper-V with 2 CPUs assigned. The disk is a raid configuration disk, and this FOG server utilizes 1 of the NICs.

[george1421]

@scott-adams Are you still seeing load averages above 2?

Also are you sure you are running ubuntu 10.04??

[Scott Adams]

@george1421 I am. Even though they are way lower. Originally, loads were above 50, now load averages are < 10.

I am on Ubuntu 16.04.4

[george1421]

@scott-adams Did you happen to make the adjustment that jburleson posted about “php_value[session.save_path]”

If you have it setup correctly apache should be using php-fpm. I know its been a while since I posted that tutorial, it still should work. Also with only 2 vCPUs its ideal to keep the system load below 2.00 as I understand it.

[Scott Adams]

@george1421 I just verified, that line is indeed in my fog.conf file. If you look through the code that is posted on that particular thread, the change has already been made in the code that is posted. But, I did open the file on my server just to verify. Like i said, it is correct.