[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ experiences on VMs

Thu Aug 12 17:12:17 BST 2010

Aaron,

Thank-you very much.  Do please let us know how you find the new
persister when run from inside a VM.  We do have the ability to feed
back this info to VMware folks who are hungry for specific use cases
involving potential performance improvements.

alexis

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Aaron Westendorf <aaron at agoragames.com> wrote:
> Our experience has been excellent, with no notable problems.  I should
> note that we're not using persistent messages, and in our experience,
> all VM IO has a huge hit on performance.  This is due to the drivers,
> which place all of the workload on the kernel and CPU, whereas on
> hardware a large portion of the work is offloaded to disk and network
> controllers.  I think this situation has improved, though disk IO is
> still our greatest bottleneck, and we don't see that on our cluster
> because all our messages are non-persistent.  We may see a different
> pattern with the new persister; we'll keep our eyes on the hosts.
>
> In the past, the memory management between Linux and the balloon
> driver was problematic, but Ubuntu 9.04 and later VMWare releases have
> fixed that problem.  There may still be edge cases we have not
> encountered, as we use monit to keep a close eye on memory usage and
> take quick action if our queues have caused Rabbit to consume too much
> memory.  That only happens when our consumers have broken, and that's
> a rare occurrence.
>
> I should also note that some of our expected high-throughput projects
> have been delayed or yielded less traffic than expected.  In hindsight
> this has been a boon because we've been able to refine our application
> stack and tool set, but by next spring, we and our rabbits will be
> fully loaded and we'll have better data from which to draw
> conclusions.
>
> cheers,
> Aaron
>
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Alexis Richardson <alexis at rabbitmq.com> wrote:
>> Aaron,
>>
>> You mentioned that you'd been running RabbitMQ on a VM.  Could you
>> please tell us how that has been going and if there is anything we
>> could do to make it better?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> alexis
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Aaron Westendorf
> Senior Software Engineer
> Agora Games
> 359 Broadway
> Troy, NY 12180
> Phone: 518.268.1000
> aaron at agoragames.com
> www.agoragames.com
>