Access prereleases? Proget 6.0.9

rhessinger

Hi @janne-aho_4082,

Thank you for providing the extra details. When you click the Clear Cache option in the tasks, that clears the permissions cache, which will mean that calls to AD will need to be made again for the impersonated user and their AD groups. There is a timeout that can also be set in the Advanced Settings on how long to cache users. The default is 60 minutes, but you may want to make sure that the value was not changed. The cache is also cleared anytime permissions/restrictions were added or removed.

As for your testing environment, is your test environment in the cloud? If so, is it in the same region as your active directory server? This can sometimes cause the performance of AD to degrade. Also, you mentioned about 20-30 seconds later in the test environment, it seems to lose the cache. What is your application pool's setting for recycling and Idle time-out? If those are too quick, that will also cause the permissions cache to reset as well.

How long did it take previously in production to run these tests?

Thanks,
Rich

janne.aho_4082

@rhessinger thanks for your explanation of the user cache.

Till yesterday our test environment had been the faster one, even if it had half the amount of ram compared to the production environment. So decided to setup the permissions for the LDAP users in the same way. The first test after that took around 60s to run, directly after that we decided to clear the cache and after that the test environment was back on 200s per run.

On the test environment the recycle time for the app pool is 1740m and idle-timeout is 10m, I assume that is default. I don't see anything about reset of the pool or crashes in the eventlog. So it don't explain why having a pause or 30 mins makes the time better than run twice after each other. Any recommended values for these configs?

Yes, the AD is in a different network which causes extra latency, but there is no difference between test and production in this regard. They are both setup in the same way when accessing their AD's.

Regarding the time to run in production the same "test" before the upgrade, I can see the last build before upgrade it took 59s to install the same packages.

atripp

Hi @janne-aho_4082 ,

Looking at your CEIP sessions, there's a lot of factors going on.

The biggest issue is that your LDAP response is incredibly slow. We can see that a basic a query to [1] find a user is taking 500-900ms, and a query to [2] find user groups is taking upwards of 7500ms. This is compounded by thousands of incoming requests, thousands of outgoing requests, relatively slow download times, and minimum hardware requirements. This all yields different/unpredictable performance, which is why you're seeing varying results so much.

All told, it looks like ~70% of the time is going to LDAP queries (each request does the find user query), ~18% is going to outbound connections, and ~8% is going to the database (most to the "get package metadata" procedure).

There's a few "overload" points, where the OS is spending more time managing multiple things than it is doing those things, and increasing CPUs ought to help.

So, at this point, I would recommend:

switch to a "Feed API Key" instead of a username:password key or "Personal API Key"
enabling metadata query caching on the connector

This should yield a significant performance improvement overall. We can consider new ways of caching things in v4 of this directory provider.... but if you have this kind of latency on your LDAP queries, it's best to just use Feed API keys...

Alana

janne.aho_4082

@atripp thanks for your reply.

I guess most of the LDAP requests are for the authentication, would it be possible to cache the authentication request and LDAP response for a short time, think that could also improve things. But sure, the test environment is limited compared to the production environment, tend to be a question about money.

About the keys, we had some keys of which a number were of old type that version 6 don't allow you to create anymore, we decided to remove all api keys that hadn't been in use for a long while, most api keys seemed to not been used at all, so we ended up with deleting all of them. Turned out that a couple of the keys were in frequent use (in production), I'm not sure if it's something we have configured on our side or there are issues in logging of successful use of the api keys?

As there been a will of having a centralized way of administrating access and also quite many places to change if switching from account credentials to api keys wouldn't happen over night. But we may have to look into that path incase we notice issues in production.

atripp

Hi @janne-aho_4082 ,

would it be possible to cache the authentication request and LDAP response for a short time

That definitely seems possible, but that's the sort of thing we'd want to implement in the "v4" of this directory provider (not as a patch in a maintenance release). I meant to link to that last time, but here it is: https://docs.inedo.com/docs/installation-security-ldap-active-directory#ldap-ad-user-directories-versions --- but v4 is a little whiles out.

switching from account credentials to api keys wouldn't happen over night

We definitely recommend this path going forward, in particular from a security standpoint. Generally a smaller attack surface in case the API key gets leaked (compared to LDAP credentials).

janne.aho_4082

Then we have something to look forward to, could be that we by then switched to API Keys, but the decision ain't mine.

Thanks for the help and for all the RC that we got to test.