Guacamole (Maybe Tomcat in General?) Web Performance Become Sluggish Over Time

["Khoe, Yonathan" <Yo...@unt.edu>]

Hello,
This is something that I've noticed through various installation of Guacamole on different hardware spec servers.  At the start of the Tomcat.service running, browsing around is snappy, but eventually clicking on different elements on the web interface (ex.: visiting the Settings page or clicking on the connection to start a remote session) takes an awfully long time.  I do notice that some time, the animated gears do appear to indicate that the web page is loading content; while any other time, there is no indicator at all to let the user know what the web interface item that they clicked on is suppose to lead them somewhere (the web browser didn't have a spinning loading indicator, etc.).  Users are expected to sit there until there is a response that lead them to the next interface/page.

In terms of # user accounts, we do have about 40k users that is stored in the database.  I'm seeing this as the only reason why Tomcat could be slow or noninteractive to respond.  Is that a valid theory?  Is there any way to improve the browsing experience while going through the web pages in general?  Some kind of best practice performance tuning?

Thanks

Yonathan Khoe
Senior Systems Administrator
CVAD IT

University of North Texas
940.565.4793
yonathan@unt.edu<ma...@unt.edu>
https://itservices.cvad.unt.edu/

Re: Guacamole (Maybe Tomcat in General?) Web Performance Become Sluggish Over Time

[David Haukeness <da...@hauken.us>]

The first two places I would check are:
 1. Memory consumption
 2. Database query speed

Java/Tomcat have a default memory heap size of 64MB, which I would consider quite small for a deployment your size. You can configure the heap size by setting CATALINA_OPTS for Tomcat, if you haven’t yet. You can also check the tomcat logs for “out of memory” errors. 

If your memory is fine, then I’d start checking your database by running a few test queries. I’d start with a differential diagnosis:
1. Run a query against the guacdb on a fresh start
2. Run the same query after a user report of slow responsiveness. 

Hopefully it’s one of those two, and in either case adding some resources to tomcat or database can help alleviate your issue. 

Best of luck!

David Haukeness

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 6, 2022, at 8:53 PM, Khoe, Yonathan <Yo...@unt.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello,
> This is something that I’ve noticed through various installation of Guacamole on different hardware spec servers.  At the start of the Tomcat.service running, browsing around is snappy, but eventually clicking on different elements on the web interface (ex.: visiting the Settings page or clicking on the connection to start a remote session) takes an awfully long time.  I do notice that some time, the animated gears do appear to indicate that the web page is loading content; while any other time, there is no indicator at all to let the user know what the web interface item that they clicked on is suppose to lead them somewhere (the web browser didn’t have a spinning loading indicator, etc.).  Users are expected to sit there until there is a response that lead them to the next interface/page.
>  
> In terms of # user accounts, we do have about 40k users that is stored in the database.  I’m seeing this as the only reason why Tomcat could be slow or noninteractive to respond.  Is that a valid theory?  Is there any way to improve the browsing experience while going through the web pages in general?  Some kind of best practice performance tuning?
>  
> Thanks
>  
> Yonathan Khoe
> Senior Systems Administrator
> CVAD IT
>  
> University of North Texas
> 940.565.4793
> yonathan@unt.edu
> https://itservices.cvad.unt.edu/
>