Process/Thread Balancing

[Karen Metallo]

We have a couple of processes inside our clinical integration for radiology services where we step outside the typical recommendation of 8-10 interfaces per process.  We do this in order to keep the inbound interface and the interfaces they route outbound to inside the same process.  We do this to improve processing through state 7 which was a problem we encountered frequently under 5.6.  We’ve since upgraded to 6.0 with improved hardware and are not sure if whether it’s better to have 20 interfaces inside the same process in order to keep an inbound and all of it’s outbound destination threads together or to keep to 8-10 interfaces per process, but introduce cross-process processing to the mix.  

We are running Cloverleaf 6.0 on UNIX AIX 7.1.

Topic

[Jerry Tilsley]

Karen,

We are running 6.02 on Redhat 6.4.  I have an ADT process that has 13 threads that runs great with no lag.  As long as you use multi-threaded translation you would have no problem.

Thanks,

Jerry

[Samir Mahapatra]

How do u enable this multi thread translation .. can display a pic from tool

[Joseph Slaker]

I’m not sure I’d call anything about the system I inherited best practice, but we have a number of processes with thread counts in the 20-40 range without any real issue.

We’re on 5.8/RHEL 5.5 on a 12 core/24 thread box, so it’s possible they simply threw enough hardware at it to make it work. Load average is around 0.40 according to top.

[bill bearden]

Samir,

Here is a screenprint. To get to this dialog box, Open NetConfig, pull down Process and select Configure. I think Configure is the only option under the Process pull-down menu. Also, you don’t see the Process pull-down menu unless you are in NetConfig.

Please, read the help on this before you try it. There are complications with this that could be very hard to troubleshoot if you have problems.

Full disclosure: we don’t use it. We looked into it when we had performance issues in Tcl code that was embedded in an Xlate. The Tcl code makes database calls and the query performance got really bad for a time. This caused the whole Cloverleaf process to be slow, even though it wasn’t using lots of CPU. We were pretty sure the translation thread within the process was blocking on the database call. Messages on unrelated connections/routes in the same process weren’t getting through either. We solved it by fixing the real problem, the query.

Good luck,

Bill

[Troy Morton]

Unfortunately, there is no “hard and fast” rule about how many threads you can put in a process or how many processes in a site, etc.

[Author]

Replies