[horde] Memcache issue

Thu May 22 17:51:28 UTC 2014

Citeren Administrator BCS <adje at bezoekerscentrumsonsbeek.nl>:

> Quoting Arjen de Korte <arjen+horde at de-korte.org>:
>
>> Citeren Administrator BCS <adje at bezoekerscentrumsonsbeek.nl>:
>>
>>> Got Horde is up and running but performance is not what it should  
>>> be. It seems I have a problem with memcache. Memcache is up and  
>>> running, I can connect to it with telnet localhost 11211, but the  
>>> stats tells me nothing is happening there.
>>
>> First question, how many concurrent users do you have? If there is  
>> a performance issue, installing memcache is not magically going to  
>> fix that for you. In you case it might help only if you have a  
>> problem with storing/retrieving session information, but that will  
>> happen only if you have many concurrent users and are starved on  
>> I/O. And even then using native memcache sessions might be  
>> preferred over using a distributed hashtable for caching session  
>> information. Enabling the latter may even worsen the problem.
>
> I have only a few users, max 25 but in most cases only 3 or 4 are  
> active simultaneously. The server is a brand new 3.2Ghz Xeon  
> quadcore machine with 4Gb RAM. Apart from the  
> Horde/apache2/postfix/dovecot/clamav stuff it's only running samba  
> (only a few users as well). So it basically has nothing to do,  
> processor load is a few % at max during peak moments.

That system should be screaming with such a minimal load, so there  
probably is indeed a configuration problem. I'm running Horde for a  
similar load on an Intel NUC with Core i3-4010U processor and 8 GB  
RAM, with subsecond response times.

First of all, I assume you have not followed the steps from  
http://www.horde.org/apps/horde/docs/PERFORMANCE yet. At the very  
least, install an opcode cache (PHP accelerator) if you not already  
did so. I'm using APC, both for opcode cache and as Horde Cache.  
You'll need to allow 64-128 MB RAM for this.

>>> When I enable Memcache server under  
>>> Configuration>Horde>Distributed Hash Table, my conf.php contains:
>>>
>>> $conf['sessionhandler']['type'] = 'Builtin';
>>> $conf['sessionhandler']['hashtable'] = true;
>>> ...
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['hostspec'] = array('localhost');
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['port'] = array('11211');
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['weight'] = array();
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['persistent'] = false;
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['compression'] = false;
>>> $conf['hashtable']['params']['large_items'] = true;
>>> $conf['hashtable']['driver'] = 'Memcache';
>>
>> The above all looks good. Assuming that 'horde-memcache-stats'  
>> provide some sensible output, you can rule out that this is the  
>> problem.
>
> Output from horde-memcache-stats:
> horde-memcache-stats
>
> Server: localhost:11211 (Version: 1.4.13 - 4 thread(s))
>     Size:          0,00 MB (Max: 64,00 MB - 0% used)
>     Items:         0 (Total: 0)
>     Cache Ratio:   0 hits, 0 misses
>     Connections:   5
>     Traffic:       0,00 MB in, 0,00 MB out
>
> It will stay that way all day.

You're not running in a cluster, so memcache is not really needed  
here. Even with SQL based session storage, you should not have  
performance issues in storing sessions.

>>> As soon as I enable memcache this way, I see some "Invalid  
>>> application" errors in Horde and I get randomly "User is not  
>>> authorized for horde" messages in the Horde log, followed by  
>>> logout. No other error messages. I set memcached logging to -vv  
>>> and see no activity at all.
>>>
>>> I suppose I do something wrong in the Horde config but after a lot  
>>> of reading and searching I got a bit lost now. Any pointers in the  
>>> right direction welcome!
>>
>> What kind of performance issue do you have? And you do use an  
>> opcode cache, right?
>
> Performance is more or less acceptable, but not the response speed I  
> would expect based upon # of users, server load and server hardware.  
> It can take over 5 seconds to process a user login and switching  
> between let's say email and calendar also can take several seconds.

A couple of suggestions:

1) Make sure Dovecot is using indexes and Postfix (in postfix/main.cf) uses

     mailbox_command = /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver

so that the IMAP indexes are updated upon delivery of mail (and not  
when you check the mailboxes).

2) Use caching for IMAP (imp/config/backends.local.php)

    $servers['imap']['disabled'] = true;
    $servers['advanced']['disabled'] = false;
    $servers['advanced']['cache'] = 'sql';

which will speed up IMP significantly.

3) Reduce checking for new mail (imp/config/prefs.local.php)

    $_prefs['newmail_notify']['locked'] = true;
    $_prefs['newmail_notify']['value'] = 0;

so that not on every change of view checks for new messages run.

4) Make sure your MySQL server is tuned for performance. I can't give  
any specific advice here. Running it on a UNIX domain socket will be  
faster than using TCP and you'll want to make sure that it has enough  
cache available. Check with phpMyAdmin for instance if it has  
suggestions for speeding things up.

5) Check if you have enough Apache processes running to handle the load.

6) Just 4 GB of RAM is not a lot for a quad core system. If all else  
fails, consider adding more.

> Btw all users are on a direct wired lan connection so that should  
> not be a bottleneck.
>
> About opcode caching: I have php5-memcache installed and phpinfo  
> shows it is enabled.

Memcache is not an opcode cache. You'll want something like APC (I  
recommend this one), eAccelerator, or XCache. Before doing anything  
else, this is the first thing you should do, as it will speed up PHP  
dramatically without much fuss.

> Hope this helps you pointing out the problem. Could very well be  
> that I am looking in the wrong place, I am by no means an expert.
>
>>
>>> Running latest Horde Groupware 5.1.4 on Ubuntu Server 12.04
>>>
>>>
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