Re: [libmicrohttpd] connection statistics

[Christian Grothoff]

The real issue with this kind of performance monitoring is that for 
multi-threaded applications it is very hard to give you a "sound" 
number.  Also, I don't see how this would be helpful for the application 
that is running at the time.

If the system operator wants this information, it is pretty easy to get 
a snapshot: lsof and netstat will show you how many connections the 
application has open and what the overall TCP state looks like for the 
OS.  So for server status monitoring, why not use these standard tools?

Now, if you actually have a very large number of mostly keep-alive 
connections, there are two possible answers: shorter timeout (so that 
they go away), or you're yet another person who'd like to see ePoll 
support for MHD (which is not that easy to add, hence it is not likely 
that I'll find the time to do this anytime soon).  Looking at how many 
select/poll calls you're doing and how long they take (for example, 
using 'strace -c -e trace=select,poll') might be a good idea here.

In summary, I'm not sure I see a need for this kind of 
performance-monitoring support to be integrated with MHD, as the OS 
already gives you this and more high-quality information easily.

My 2 cents!

Happy hacking!

Christian

On 02/11/2012 12:40 AM, Eivind Sarto wrote:
> The completion callback handler is called whenever an HTTP request has 
> completed.
> At that point there is no way of knowing if the connection remains open.
>
> -eivind
> ________________________________________
> From: address@hidden address@hidden On Behalf Of Keith Mendoza address@hidden
> Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 3:32 PM
> To: libmicrohttpd development and user mailinglist
> Subject: Re: [libmicrohttpd] connection statistics
>
> If you're intent is to see the number of active connections at the
> moment I would say that this is something that you should be able to
> do from within your application. This might even prove useful to you
> at some future time in handling streaming of the video data. I can't
> provide any use cases, but I'm getting the "it might be useful" itch.
>
> If I understand it correctly, the completion handler is called when
> the HTTP connected between your application and the client is closed.
> So, if the keep-alive is still there wouldn't that mean that the
> connection is still open and the completion callback should not be
> called?
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Eivind Sarto<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > I am using libmicrohttpd for a video streaming project.
> > The HTTP server load can be quite high with a large number of requests per 
> > seconds and a high network bandwidth,
> > but the HTTP connections are mostly keep-alives.
> >
> > In order to troubleshoot load related problems, it can be difficult to get an 
> > idea of what is going on a given server.
> > I want to add some kind of server status monitoring and I would like to be able 
> > to display the number of active
> > connections/requests and total connections/requests (among other things).
> >
> > I can collect total and active number of requests from counters in the callback 
> > to the default handler and the completion handler.
> > However, I cannot find a way to get the total and active number of connections. 
> >  The only one who can keep an accurate count of
> > the number of connections is the internals of the library.
> >
> > Does anyone see any value to adding some statistics/counters to libmicrohttpd 
> > that can returned via an API?
> >
> > Or, is there something I am overlooking that I could do to display the number 
> > of active connections and total connections created?
> >
> > -eivind