I am trying to benchmark a memcached server. The results produced for TCP traffic are in terms of number of requests, number of hits, number of misses, number of gets, number of sets, delay time, etc. I am confused about how to produce throughput measure from it.
I suggest doing a lot of experiments at different loads, and drawing a graph of response time vs. requests-per-second.
Typically you will get a graph that looks like the one at the top of this paper by Hart et al which has an obvious "knee" which shows that if you apply too much load the response time suddenly gets much worse.
You could consider the requests-per-second of this knee to be throughput of your memcached system.
Related
what I have done
I try to compare the performance of CH algorithm and TransitNode algorithm and have run them with several small countries (using osm.xml and relevant file).
What I found is the precomputation of TransitNode is quite longer than CH, but the query time is faster than CH's
problem
I want to run it in some big countries, such as malaysia, brazil and so on. But the precomputation of TransitNode is so long and it need large memory.
My problem is can TransitNode algorithm be used on big graph such as brazil.
I am practicing System Design concepts and I am not clear what configuration (cpu, memory, disk storage) to pick for an application instance? Also, how many instances are needed (assuming you are running your application on Kubernetes cluster)
For Back of the envelope calculation ,I saw examples of calculating tps for read and write calls, calculate bandwidth needs, database storage needs etc. but I have not seen how to determine cpu, memory needs and how many instances are enough. Is there a procedure that guides to solve this problem?
My hunch says that we pick small to medium sized server instance (if we use cloud provider like AWS) and run stress tests for calculated TPS and see CPU and memory usage and see if we need to increase or decrease server configuration based on results?
I would greatly appreciate any inputs you may have.
I am not clear what configuration (cpu, memory, disk storage) to pick for an application instance? Also, how many instances are needed (assuming you are running your application on Kubernetes cluster)
This is mostly a question about economics. If resources was very cheap, you could use a lot of them - but unfortunately, they have an economic cost.
Scale out horizontal or scale up vertical
The first fundamental question to ask, should you scale up your app vertically (e.g. to bigger instances) or should you scale out your app horizontally.
The most important thing here is that scaling out horizontally is much easier. But wether you can scale out horizontally of if you have to scale up vertically depends on your app. If your app is a stateless webserver, it typically is very easy to scale out, but if you have a stateful cache or database, scale up vertically might be your only short term option. Try to design so that you can scale out horizontally since that is much easier.
Accurate size - use observability
To find your accurate size, use observability and investigate your bottlenecks and adjust relatively to that.
E.g. if you use too little memory, your app will be terminated, or if you use too little CPU, your response time will be slow. Just start somewhere and adjust.
In addition to Jonas's answer:
You have two approaches (which are not mutually exclusive):
Estimate your needs based on expected load, etc.
Adjust you needs based on what you observe in production.
Regarding the first approach:
Have you done any analysis into what your expected load is? E.g. how many users (unique sessions), how many requests on average per hour (page views, API calls, etc), potential peaks in activity leading to increased load, etc.
Have you done any benchmarking?
Have you looked at your system and what it does, and worked out if it has any specific resource (CPU, memory, disk, etc) needs?
Estimating resources ahead of time requires some knowledge (or informed guesses) regarding what the load will be, as per the 3 points above. Having an idea of what the daily or hourly request average is isn't a bad place to start.
Also make sure you aware if any potential spikes that might catch you out (end of month for financial systems/services). Whether or not these are significant enough that is worth worrying about is another thing. A friend of mine was working on a ticketing system once, and they had massive traffic spikes for major events that did warrant serious scaling-out and back... but your average system probably won't need to be that extreme.
CPU is probably only worth "worrying" about if you have anything that does any above average processing - this should be obvious through benchmarking or if you/your team has good knowledge of your code.
Disk usage can be calculated - e.g.
If on average a user generates 1Mb of data in a session (not including system logs), and you get 100 sessions a day then that's 100Mb a day, 500Mb a working week, 200Mb a month, etc.
If a user profile has on average 200Kb of data and 300Kb of storage space (images) then you can calculate that.
You can also do this for records, especially for records that you know are "large" (e.g. >25mb) or where there will be lots of them (e.g. millions).
You can also start to forecast growth over time if you allow a growth rate (e.g. number of users and their sessions, and the amount of data generated). A simple way to do that is to have a spreadsheet with some simple formulas that take various inputs like number of users, average requests per user, disk space per user, etc. You can then do what-if modelling by playing with the inputs.
In terms of the second approach - as Jonas says, observe and adjust. Make sure you know how to do that, and that your solution provides the data you need. This might be using metrics provided by your cloud-provider (if applicable) or instrumentation / reporting you have custom built into you solution.
Scaling-Up is probably more relevant in scenarios where you have a central point/resource that cannot be scaled-out, like a central database.
I have a problem that I don't have enough training data for my NN. It is trying to predict the result of a soccer game given the last games which I woulf say is a regression task.
The training data are results of soccer games of the last 15 seasons (which are about 4500 games). Getting to new data would be hard and would take a lot of time.
What should I do now?
Is it good to duplicate the data?
Should I input randomized data? (Maybe noise but I'm not quite sure what that is)
If there is no way of creating more data,
I should probably turn up the learning rate right? (I have it sitting at 0.01 and the momentum at 0.9)
I am using mini batches consisting of 32 training datas in training. Since I don't have a lot of training I don't have a lot of mini batches. Should I stop using them?
To start from the beginning: This is a very theoretical question and is not directly related to programming, which I recommend (in future) to post over at the Data Science Stackexchange.
To go into your problem: 4500 samples is not as bad as it sounds, depending on the exact task at hand. Are you trying to predict the match results (i.e. which team is the winner?), are you looking for more specific predictions (across a lot of different, specific teams)?
If you can make sure that you have a reasonable amount of data per class, one can work with a number of samples lower than what you have. Simply duplicating the data will not help you much, since you are very likely to just overfit on the samples you are seeing, without much of an improvement; Or rather, you will get the same results as training over a longer period (since essentially you see every sample twice per epoch, instead of one).
Again, what usually happens after long training periods is overfitting, so nothing gained here.
Your second suggestion is generally called data augmentation. Instead of simply copying samples, you alter them enough to make it look "different" to the network. But be careful! Data augmentation works well for some inputs, like images, since the change in input is significant enough to not represent the same sample, but still contains meaningful information about the class (a horizontally mirrored image of a cat still shows a "valid cat", unlike a vertically mirrored image, which is more unrealistic in the real world).
Essentially, it depends on your input features to determine where it makes sense to add noise. If you are only changing the results of the previous game, a minor change in input (adding/subtracting one goal at random) can significantly change the prediction you make.
If you slightly scramble ELO scores by a random number, on the other hand, the input value will not be too different, "but different enough" to use it as a novel example.
Turning up the learning rate is not a good idea, since you are essentially just letting the network converge more towards the specific samples. On the contrary, I would argue that the current learning rate is still too high, and you should certainly not increase it.
Regarding mini batches, I think I have referenced this a million times now, but always consider smaller minibatches. From a theoretical point of view, you are more likely to converge to a local minimum.
Is there a way to calculate the electricity consumed to load and render a webpage (frontend)? I was thinking of a 'test' made with phantomjs for example:
load a web page
scroll to the bottom
And measure how much electricity was needed. I can perhaps extrapolate from CPU cycle. But phantomjs is headless, rendering in real browser is certainly different. Perhaps it's impossible to do real measurements.. but with an index it may be possible to compare websites.
Do you have other suggestions?
It's pretty much impossible to measure this internally in modern processors (anything more recent than 286). By internally, I mean by counting cycles. This is because different parts of the processor consume different levels of energy per cycle depending upon the instruction.
That said, you can make your measurements. Stick a power meter between the wall and the processor. Here's a procedure:
Measure the baseline energy usage, i.e. nothing running except the OS and the browser, and the browser completely static (i.e. not doing anything). You need to make sure that everything is stead state (SS) meaning start your measurements only after several minutes of idle.
Measure the usage doing the operation you want. Again, you want to avoid any start up and stopping work, so make sure you start measuring at least 15 seconds after you start the operation. Stopping isn't an issue since the browser will execute any termination code after you finish your measurement.
Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, because of the nature of your measurements, there are some gotchas.
Do you recall your physics classes (or EE classes) that talked about signal to noise ratios? Well, a scroll down uses very little energy, so the signal (scrolling) is well in the noise (normal background processes). This means you have to take a LOT of samples to get anything useful.
Your browser startup energy usage, or anything else that uses a decent amount of processing, is much easier to measure (better signal to noise ratio).
Also, make sure you understand the underlying electronics. For example, power is VA (voltage*amperage) where both V and A are in phase. I don't think this will be an issue since I'm pretty sure they are in phase for computers. Also, any decent power meter understands the difference.
I'm guessing you intend to do this for mobile devices. Your measurements will only be roughly the same from processor to processor. This is due to architectural differences from generation to generation, and from manufacturer to manufacturer.
Good luck.
I want to know how can one calculate bandwidth requirements based upon flows and viceversa.
Meaning if I had to achieve total of 50,000 netflows what is the bandwidth requirement to produce this number? Is there a formula for this. I'm using this to size up flow analyzer appliance. If its license says supports 50,000 flows what does this means. How more bandwidth if i increase I would lose the license coverage?
Most applications and appliances list flow volume per second, so you are asking what the bandwidth requirement is to transport 50k netflow updates per second:
For NetFlow v5 each record is 48 bytes each with each packet carrying 20 or so records, with 24 bytes overhead per packet. This means you'd use about 20Mbps to carry the flow packets. If you used NetFlow v9 which uses a template based format it might be a bit more, or less, depending on what is included in the template.
However, if you are asking how much bandwidth you can monitor with 50k netflow updates per second, the answer becomes more complex. In our experience monitoring regular user networks (using google, facebook, etc) an average flow update encompasses roughly 25kbytes of transferred data. Meaning 50,000 flow updates per second would equate to monitoring 10Gbps of traffic. Keep in mind that these are very rough estimates.
This answer may vary, however, if you are monitoring a server-centric network in a datacenter, where each flow may be much larger or smaller, depending on content served. The bigger each individual traffic session is, the higher the bandwidth will be you can monitor with 50,000 flow updates per second.
Finally, if you enable sampling in your NetFlow exporters you will be able to monitor much more bandwidth. Sampling will only use 1 in every N packets, thus skipping many flows. This lowers the total number of flow updates per second needed to monitor high-volume networks.