Products.LongRequestLogger 1.0

Introduction

This product dumps stack traces of long running requests of a Zope2 instance to a log file. If a request takes more than a configured timeout, it’s stack trace will be dumped periodically to a log file.

Installation

Configuration

Add (or change) the “environment” section of your zope.conf to something like this:

# Products.LongRequestLogger config
<environment>
      longrequestlogger_file $INSTANCE/log/longrequest.log
      longrequestlogger_timeout 4
      longrequestlogger_interval 2
</environment>

The following variables are recognised:

• “longrequestlogger_file”: This is a mandatory variable. Its absence means the LongRequestLogger monkey-patch to the publication machinery will not be applied. It should point to a file where you want the long requests to be logged.

• “longrequestlogger_timeout”: The amount of seconds after which long requests start being logged. Accepts floating point values and defaults to 2.

• “longrequestlogger_interval”: The frequency at which long requests will have their stack trace logged once they have exceeded their ‘timeout’ above. Defaults to 1 and accepts floating point values.

For the curious, the use of environment variables instead of ZConfig directives is due to two reasons:

1. The environment variable can be changed at runtime to affect the behaviour of the logger.

2. Old Zope versions don’t have the ability to use “product-config” syntax, and writing a ZConfig component for just 3 keys is overkill.

Interpreting results

It’s important to keep in mind a few important facts about the behaviour of Zope2 applications and threads while looking at the results:

1. Each thread only handles one request at a time.

2. Slow requests will usually have tracebacks with a common top part and a variable bottom part. The key to the cause of the slowdown in a request will be in the limit of both.

If you’re in a pinch and don’t want to parse the file to rank the slowest URLs for investigation, pick up a time in seconds that’s a multiple of your interval plus the timeout and grep for it. For the default settings, of time-out and interval, you will find log entries for 4 then 6 then 8 seconds, so you can do a grep like:

$ grep -n "Running for 8" longrequest.log

And decide with URLs show up more. Then you can open the log file, go to the line number reported and navigate the tracebacks by searching up and down the file for the same thread id (the number after “Thread” in the reported lines). Then analise the difference between the tracebacks of a single request to get a hint on what this particular request is doing and why it is slowing down.

By doing this for a number of similar requests you will be able to come up with optimisations or a caching strategy.

Changelog

1.0

• Initial release