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On Wed, 28 Mar 2018, iain MacDonnell wrote:

> Looking for recommendations on tuning of nova-placement-api. I have a few 
> moderately-sized deployments (~200 nodes, ~4k instances), currently on Ocata, 
> and instance creation is getting very slow as they fill up.

This should be well within the capabilities of an appropriately
installed placement service, so I reckon something is weird about
your installation. More within.

> $ time curl http://apihost:8778/
> {"error": {"message": "The request you have made requires authentication.", 
> "code": 401, "title": "Unauthorized"}}
> real	0m20.656s
> user	0m0.003s
> sys	0m0.001s

This is good choice for trying to determine what's up because it
avoids any interaction with the database and most of the stack of
code: the web server answers, runs a very small percentage of the
placement python stack and kicks out the 401. So this mostly
indicates that socket accept is taking forever.

> nova-placement-api is running under mod_wsgi with the "standard"(?) config, 
> i.e.:

Do you recall where this configuration comes from? The settings for
WSGIDaemonProcess are not very good and if there is some packaging
or documentation that is settings this way it would be good to find
it and fix it.

Depending on what else is on the host running placement I'd boost
processes to number of cores divided by 2, 3 or 4 and boost threads to
around 25. Or you can leave 'threads' off and it will default to 15
(at least in recent versions of mod wsgi).

With the settings a below you're basically saying that you want to
handle 3 connections at a time, which isn't great, since each of
your compute-nodes wants to talk to placement multiple times a
minute (even when nothing is happening).

Tweaking the number of processes versus the number of threads
depends on whether it appears that the processes are cpu or I/O
bound. More threads helps when things are I/O bound.

> ...
>  WSGIProcessGroup nova-placement-api
>  WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
>  WSGIPassAuthorization On
>  WSGIDaemonProcess nova-placement-api processes=3 threads=1 user=nova 
> group=nova
>  WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/bin/nova-placement-api
> ...

[snip]

> Other suggestions? I'm looking at things like turning off 
> scheduler_tracks_instance_changes, since affinity scheduling is not needed 
> (at least so-far), but not sure that that will help with placement load 
> (seems like it might, though?)

This won't impact the placement service itself.

A while back I did some experiments with trying to overload
placement by using the fake virt driver in devstack and wrote it up
at https://anticdent.org/placement-scale-fun.html

The gist was that with a properly tuned placement service it was
other parts of the system that suffered first.

-- 
Chris Dent                       ٩◔̯◔۶           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent