How does freeradius calculate the number of required threads?

[Alan DeKok]

"Pshem Kowalczyk" <pshem.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out optimal configuration for our radius-proxy
> farm. atm the farm is handling about 10-15 req/sec per device with the
> following config (two servers, load-balanced using an slb)

  A normal RADIUS server should be able to handle 100's to 1000's of
requests per second.  10-15/s is pretty small.

> With this configuration both servers run between 25 and 35 threads.
> Everything is fine (except for huge memory consumption), but when i
> try to point another device to the load balanced ip (device creates
> about 15-20req/sec (auth+acct)) freeradius starts spawning threads
> untill it hits the limit (both freeradius and rlm_perl)

  The server spawns more threads when all of the current threads are
busy.  It looks to me like your Perl scripts are taking WAY too long
to process a request.  i.e. If they take 1/10 of a second, then your
server can handle 10 requests/s.

> I suspect that about 50-60 threads would do the job, but if
> i drop the limit  to 60 it just locks quicker.
> Any ideas how to fix that?

  The problem isn't the number of threads.  It's that each request is
taking too long to process.  Find out why.

  Alan DeKok.
--
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