Why does the performance drops that much when my Erlang TCP proxy gets many concurrent requests?

Question

For learning purposes I've written a simple TCP proxy in Erlang. It works but I experience an odd performance fall-off when I use ab (Apache Bench) to make many concurrent requests. It's not the performance fall-off per se that makes me wonder but the scale of the fall-off. The backend is nginx as a web server. My proxy sits inbetween ab and nginx.

This is the code of my proxy.

-module(proxy).
-export([start/3]).

start(InPort, OutHost, OutPort) ->
  {ok, Listen} = gen_tcp:listen(InPort, [binary, {packet, 0}, {active, once}]),
  spawn(fun() -> connect(Listen, OutHost, OutPort) end).

connect(Listen, OutHost, OutPort) ->
  {ok, Client} = gen_tcp:accept(Listen),
  spawn(fun() -> connect(Listen, OutHost, OutPort) end),
  {ok, Server} = gen_tcp:connect(OutHost, OutPort, [binary, {packet, 0}, {active, once}]),
  loop(Client, Server).

loop(Client, Server) ->
  receive
    {tcp, Client, Data} ->
      gen_tcp:send(Server, Data),
      inet:setopts(Client, [{active, once}]),
      loop(Client, Server);
    {tcp, Server, Data} ->
      gen_tcp:send(Client, Data),
      inet:setopts(Server, [{active, once}]),
      loop(Client, Server);
    {tcp_closed, _} ->
      ok
  end.

Firing a 64 sequential requests at my proxy I get a very good result.

ab -n 64 127.0.0.1:80/

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.097 seconds
Complete requests:      64
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      23168 bytes
HTML transferred:       9664 bytes
Requests per second:    659.79 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.516 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.516 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          233.25 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.3      0       1
Processing:     1    1   0.5      1       2
Waiting:        0    1   0.4      1       2
Total:          1    1   0.5      1       2

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      1
  66%      2
  75%      2
  80%      2
  90%      2
  95%      2
  98%      2
  99%      2
 100%      2 (longest request)

It's just a little slower than using Apache Bench directly against nginx.

But firing 64 concurrent requests at the proxy the performance drops crazy

ab -n 64 -c 64 127.0.0.1:80/

Concurrency Level:      64
Time taken for tests:   2.011 seconds
Complete requests:      64
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      23168 bytes
HTML transferred:       9664 bytes
Requests per second:    31.82 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2011.000 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       31.422 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          11.25 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   31 121.7      0     501
Processing:     3 1135 714.4   1001    2006
Waiting:        3 1134 714.3   1000    2005
Total:          3 1167 707.8   1001    2006

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   1001
  66%   1502
  75%   2003
  80%   2004
  90%   2005
  95%   2005
  98%   2005
  99%   2006
 100%   2006 (longest request)

What/where is the problem? I expected a lower performance but why this much? Look at the requests per second!

It doens't seem to matter much wether I give erl a lot of threads using +A. I even tried SMP but the results are almost the same.

My set up: Windows 7 64, Intel QuadCore, 8GB RAM. I get similar results on Ubuntu using 128 concurrent requests.

EDIT: Included new insight. The total count of requests doesn't matter. It's just the count of concurrent requests.

Answer 1

have you tried the same tests directly to nginx? if not configured correctly it can also exhibit a performance drop like that.

Answer 2

I'm unable to replicate your results. I tried your tests using apache, yaws, and nginx as the webservers and found very little variation run with and without the proxy with any of them. I did run them on Linux so maybe it's a problem with Windows or the Windows version of the erlang VM.

Answer 3

This part of connect/3 is serial:

connect(Listen, OutHost, OutPort) ->
  {ok, Client} = gen_tcp:accept(Listen),
  spawn(fun() -> connect(Listen, OutHost, OutPort) end),

You can't accept new connection until new spawned process doing gen_tcp:accept/1 is ready. It can involve bottleneck to your code. You can try pool of "acceptors" to improve performance in this case. I would also try add catch all clause to loop/2 receive to avoid incidentally mailbox stuffing.

And also what is your erl parameters? Are +A threads and +K true involved?