Posted by Cayenne on June 29, 2010 at 5:18am
I'm enjoying my pressflow/mercury installation very much on a Rackspace Lucid Lynx instance.
An interesting thing that I note is that the number of "guests" grows over time and seems to take up the available memory. Now, we're only talking a few hundred "guests," but I do not think they are real. Not willing to blame Pantheon, but has anyone any thoughts on this issue?
Thanks!
Comments
What do you mean by "the
What do you mean by "the number of guests" the number of users browsing the site? And how is Drupal and/or the server displaying these guests as browsing the site?
On the command line you can use :
netstat -plan|grep :80|awk {'print $5'}|cut -d: -f 1|sort|uniq -c|sort -nk 1to see the number of times each IP address is connecting to your server on port 80. I use this when I want to check if a server is getting DoSed.
I mean the number in the standard Whos Online block
I mean the number of 'guests' reported by drupal in the standard "who's online" block. That number is normally in the low single digits and had gone up into the range of 90-100.
This is before we get our big crunch of visitors in about two weeks.
I ran a load test of 250 users, and was seeing about 600 in that same little box.
Okay, running netstat (thanks for the tip) I see only 3 connections to the site this early morning, and the box is reporting 3 users and "25 guests"
What I am guessing is that these are non-timed-out caches or something that is fooling the, um, "guest counter." But others will know more than I. What concerns me is that this not become some artificial problem?
Otherwise, this setup rocks!
The only obvious thing that
The only obvious thing that comes to mind is the "Who's Online" block displays all sessions open in the past 15 mins (I think it's 15 mins). So technically the user may have already left the site. Apart from that the only thing I can think of is some issue with Varnish but can't imagine what.
My thinking too
I guess I will not worry about it unless something bad happens.
Hmm, that's not a bad life philosophy.
"guests"
The number for "guests" is defined in the "who's online" block settings. If you want to juke your stats, you can turn it up to an hour, which makes you look REALLY popular.
Because of the way pressflow doesn't start distinct user sessions for anonymous users until absolutely ready, you might also see some unpredictable results there. However, as per the above, most people don't take this number all that seriously. ;)
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Boost crawler?
I've noticed that the crawler for the Boost module can create unrealistically high logged in users counts, even with the 'Who's Online' block set to about two minutes. Assuming this all ties in with what joshk said.
I found similar effects with the AJAX calls made by the pmgrowl module and as for Cayenne's memory issues, this module nearly brought my server to a grinding halt until I increased the polling time from about 10 secs to 30 secs.
Just my 2 pence....