WeBWorK Main Forum

Measureing System Performance

Measureing System Performance

by Kurt O'Hearn -
Number of replies: 4
Hello all,

I've been sifting through the wiki, but I haven't found any tools bundled with WeBWorK for gathering and reporting time series data on system performance (such as CPU usage and network traffic). However, I did find the timing_log_check.pl script mentioned in the following link:

http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/WeBWorK_performance

I would like finer data then this tool is generating. So, I am considering installing the RRDtool to get long-term statistics on my system (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRDtool for more info), but I wanted to check first if anything else is available that I overlooked.

Thank you.
-Kurt
In reply to Kurt O'Hearn

Re: Measureing System Performance

by Jason Aubrey -
Hi Kurt,

I had not heard of that tool before, but it looks great. If you get it running and collect some data from it we'd really appreciate it if you could document it's use on the wiki - I think there is a lot of interest in collecting good performance data.

Thanks,
Jason

In reply to Kurt O'Hearn

Re: Measureing System Performance

by Sarunas Burdulis -
We have been using Munin [http://munin-monitoring.org] for quite a while. Here is what the default, out-of-the-box Munin install on Ubuntu shows for a dedicated Webwork box:
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/munin/dartmouth.edu/webwork.dartmouth.edu/index.html

Before Munin, I tried RRDTool directly (http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/ddr/webwork/webwork), and of course it's gives all the flexibility, and one can plot whatever they want, but it so much easier to just 'apt-get install munin-node' :)

Munin plugins are quite easy to write. Looks like the timing_log_check.pl can be a good start for at least one of such plugins. But what Webwork parameters (or their derivatives) would it be useful to keep track off over the time?

Sarunas




In reply to Kurt O'Hearn

Re: Measureing System Performance

by Mark Hamrick -
I have used Nagios to monitor my boxes, along with a modified script I found on here to dump out the number of users. I also have some R code that flips through the logs to see what kind of devices were accessing the site.

I am considering using Google Analytics to provide some more information on the network traffic.
In reply to Kurt O'Hearn

Re: Measureing System Performance

by Rajiv Sood -

In MAA on "Webwork" server, I am using “webmin” tool, which is basically a GUI interface for Linux administration and it has different add-on modules. One of the add-on is  “webmin system stats” for system performance / application monitoring.

Webminstats is a Webmin's module which display a graphical log of historic information. It's modular in design, as to be able to log everything from CPU usage to email box size.

URL for "Webmin" is http://www.webmin.com/

Tool "webmin system stats" can be downloaded  http://sourceforge.net/projects/webminstats/