Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 429304
client uses excessive memory in performance tests
Last modified: 2012-12-07 12:46:04 EST
Description of problem: Heavy-load testing with 16 clients cause memory to run out on an 8G machine.) Clearly the clients are consuming too much memory. Probable solution: Clients have an unbounded queue for outgoing messages/frames. This means that a client sending a large number of messages with no delay (such as the perftest client) may enqueue *every* message it has before anything gets sent to the network. The outgoing queue needs to be size-bounded and block when the total size buffered frames exceed N bytes of data. (Note it should *not* be count-bounded since frames can be of variable size, the goal is to limit memory consumption not frame production) The limit N can be hard coded for now, ultimately it should be configurable but we need a client-side configuration mechanism for that. Note this is completely independent of AMQP flow control. AMQP flow control is designed to protect the broker, this is designed to protect the client's address space.
I have added some bounds checking to the client. Only application threads will block (the io thread needs to send back some controls at times and that never blocks). The bounds are specified as a multiple of the max-frame-size and defaults to 2. Previously I could not run perftests with large counts (anything over 200k on my laptop) without the client running out of memory. Now I can run with counts of several million messages.
qpidc-0.2.656926-1.el5 and qpidd-0.2.656926-1.el5 have been pushed to the staging repo for testing