Mylyn popularity == busy Bugzilla
All morning I have been watching our servers glow a nice shade of orange, meaning they are quite busy. A quick glance at our monitors indicate CPU usage is high, and the culprit is Perl. That can only mean one thing: someone is pounding on Bugzilla.
Tailing the logfiles reveals it’s not “someone”, but actually “lots of people” — and the most popular user agent is a combination of Eclipse Mylyn (HttpClient/3.0.1) and Java/1.x.x_xx, which is usually an Eclipse signature as well.
So if this Mylyn thing keeps increasing in popularity, we’ll definitely have to look at some front-line caching mechanism for Bugzilla. Congrats to Myk and team for putting noticeable load on our servers! 
Posted July 10th, 2007 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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9 Responses to “Mylyn popularity == busy Bugzilla”
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Maarten Meijer Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 9:32 am
I think its only recently started to identify itselfhttps://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=184514
Mik Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Wow, we were wondering when we might cross the most popular user agent barrier. This is a really neat sign because it indicates that more people are accessing the Eclipse Bugzilla with a rich Eclipse client than with the web browser, which to me is another validation for how effective Eclipse RCP apps can be.
On the flipside, Mylyn is on the hook for making sure that we minimize Bugzilla network traffic. We added the custom user agent signature to make sure that sysadmins could help us do this
We have a bunch of strategies in place to minimize traffic, such as ensuring that all queries are incremental (i.e., only query for bugs changed since the last synch). But when people first create their queries we download all of the relevant bug data, meaning that there is a bigger up-front network hit. So I’d be very curious to hear about whether the network traffic profile changes at all over time. If you see anything interesting please feel free to file a bug against us along the lines of “monitor/minimize Bugzilla Connector network traffic”.
> Congrats to Myk and team
LOL, I like this spelling and think that I’ll have my name legally changed too.
Denis Roy Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 9:43 am
It also seems to fetch config.cgi fairly often. On our site, that’s a 900KB file.
Myk Kyrstyn
Gunnar Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Myk, it’s not that bad. Webmasters can rewrite you guys now.
Denis Roy Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Actually, it’s not the most popular. I lied.
On one server, of the last 400 CGI hits, 179 are from Mylyn. Still pretty impressive!
Evan Hughes Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 10:46 am
I would tend to agree with mik/myk. That load is an indication that mylyn has to start being more frugal with bandwidth. There’s lots of experience in the RSS community with using ETags and change stamps to minimize network load.
Any indication how many users are behind those 179 hits?
It would be handy if each mylyn client could uniquely identify itself as well, to allow for accurate usage stats.
Michael Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 11:58 am
I think an interesting observation to make here is that the default auto-synchronize for Mylyn is 20 minutes. For CVS, we turn off auto-synchronize by default because we knew if we turned it on we would flood CVS servers. I would suggest that a default 20 minute refresh is probably too frequent and that auto-synchronize should actually be off by default, especially considering that the bugzilla feature of Mylyn is secondary to the main purpose. Tat is, if I am using Mylyn to focus my tasks and happen to try the bugzilla query once, I’ll be hitting the server every 20 minutes even if I never look at Bugzilla again. I’ve logged bug 196021 for this.
Mik Says:
July 10th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Denis said:
> It also seems to fetch config.cgi fairly often.
> On our site, that’s a 900KB file.
Yup, this is a result of a limitation that we work around with Bugzilla, so I’ve created a bug where we can explore how to streamline this for Mylyn 2.1.
Maarten Meijer Says:
October 4th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Of that 900K 280K was leading and trailing whitespace. That has been fixed.
Gzipping is also possible, vote for bug 205416: In order to reduce traffic, the bugzilla should not only cache its config but also gzip it
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=205416
Then the Mylyn client can start to accept that.