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We have seen that sometimes under certain loads test cases would fail when they are spinning up a large amount of client and server connections as a part of the test execution. The below setting seems to address some of the issues we have encountered. It stands to reason that under a heavy load it would benefit a server outside of the test case environment as well.
Mac OSX
> sudo sysctl -w kern.ipc.somaxconn=256
kern.ipc.somaxconn controls the size of the connection listening queue and typically only needs to be adjusted in high-performance server environments. The default value of 128 is more than adequate for a home/work machine and most workgroup servers. If, however, you are running a high-volume server and connections are getting refused at a TCP level, then you want to increase this. This is a very tweakable setting in such a case. Too high and you'll get resource problems as it tries to notify a server of a large number of connections and many will remain pending, and too low and you'll get refused connections.
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From http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/configuration/mac_os_x_network_tuning_guide_revisited
Linux
> sudo /sbin/sysctl -w net.core.somaxconn=256
This is the same setting described above for Mac OSX.
> sudo /sbin/sysctl -w net.core.netdev_max_backlog=3000
The net.core.netdev_max_backlog controls the size of the incoming packet queue for upper-layer (java) processing.
This setting has allowed the developers to properly address various performance testing aspects of jetty-client, however, this isn't the only mechanism for tweaking congestion on a Linux environment.
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