Wednesday, March 18, 2009

What takes 125 users 66 hours to discover?

Unfortunately, I think the answer is a very slow memory leak.


For our application, we typically run 3 classes of performance test. Our quick test with 100 users for 1 hour, our longer test with 125 users for 8 hours, and our really long test with 125 users for 66 hours.

The 1 and 8 hour tests were fine this time, but looking at the garbage collection logs and zooming out over a very long time period, we see that the application is holding on to memory. The blue area represents the memory that is used and released. The black area, that is slowing moving upwards, is the memory that is used and not released.

The last performance problem that we fixed was related to xml parsing and xpath. This time it looks like we need to tune Velocity.

1 comment:

Shlomo said...

Now I'm interested to see how you fix this... ;)