Hey all,
We are using wildfire 3.1.1 for chat on our website through a flash client (XIFF), and have started to notice some weird latency issues. I am hoping someone more experienced may be able to point us in the right direction. What we are doing is setting up rooms and allowing users to enter them and chat with each other. When a room reaches 80 or 90 users, it is quite common to get 10-15 seconds of latency between sending a message and having it echoed back to you by the server.
We have verified that the client is sending the message with no latency, and the client still receives messages from other users (as well as presence messages) during this time. It is as if the user’'s chat messages are being queued up on the server side for some reason.
This problem has existed for some time, but was much more rare before we started having such a high number of users in chat.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Ben (www.kongregate.com)
Hey Ben,
There are a couple of things you can try out. If at all possible I would recommend using Wildfire 3.2.0 RC (although it seems to no longer work with Flash clients - I will try to fix that tomorrow) and see if you have the same performance problems.
When you observe performance problems and you want to see what the server is doing then the best way to use obtain a thread dump of the JVM. Under unix/linux you will need to execute *kill -3 * and the dump will be stored in the stdout. Feel free to send me that info by email so I can check it out.
If you cannot use Wildfire 3.2.0 then you may want to use a Connection Manager in front of the Wildfire. It is possible that the server is blocked trying to send something to a client whose connection got disconnected (or is super slow) and that is blocking other threads. Since you are mentioning that you are getting other messages but not the room messages then I would guess that the previous case is your case. I think that a CM may be of help for you in that case.
Regards,
– Gato
Thanks so much for the quick reply, I have been looking into 3.2.0, and hacked it so that it will work with the flash client, but it would be nice to have a real fix. I’'ll try to get in contact with you tomorrow regarding these other issues!