What is the max nr of hosts and containers Rancher is able to manage?

Rancher 1.x
1

I have seen this questions over and over in different posts left unanswered…here I try again.

What is the maximum number of hosts a standard single node Rancher installation can support? (With support I mean user does not experience slowness in the rancher UI nor via the API.)

Up to how many containers is Rancher Cattle able to support?

2

Hi ,

We use a 4 host and run 10 stack and 62 containers and all good.

Maybe it’s will help you.

Best regards

3

2 env
~10 host
~30 stack
~200-250 containers
use on production

and someone bacheson:
https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/3888#issuecomment-194518656

4

thank you @Negash

we have optimized already the rancher setup by using an external mysql with innodb_buffer_pool_size=2GB see full compose file

we have around
~70 hosts
~10 environments
~ 700 containers

it runs ok…but at times the Rancher server is very busy, CPU goes to the roof for minutes …until it comes back to normal…during this time rancher UI is not responsive.

I saw that rancher is addressing some performance issues in release 1.2, let’s keep our fingers crossed
https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/5272

1 Like
5

I have 4 environments (Prod, QA, Dev, and Ops) running across 46 hosts in AWS ranging in size from t2.large to m3.2xlarge instances. I will run anywhere from 1000 - 2500 containers on Cattle.

Screenshot 2016-08-19 09.35.30.png231×685 21.4 KB

The bottleneck right now seems to be the rancher server CPU. We’ve found we have to roll out services slowly so we kill the server with all the traffic. You also have to be careful when viewing the infrastructure page or how many tabs open you have with Rancher or the server CPU will spike.

I’d love to see some switches to dial down the responsiveness of the Rancher server so it doesn’t make so many requests.

1 Like
6

here is a follow up to our performance issues.

we ran the mysqltuner.pl on Rancher server’s external mysql. Besides security, these were the recommendations:

General recommendations:
    Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries
    Reduce or eliminate unclosed connections and network issues
    Increase table_open_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits
    Read this before increasing table_open_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C
    Beware that open_files_limit (1048576) variable 
    should be greater than table_open_cache ( 400)
Variables to adjust:
    query_cache_type (=0)
    thread_cache_size (> 8)
    table_open_cache (> 400)
    innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 11G) if possible.
    innodb_buffer_pool_instances(=2)

Basically, we should have innodb_buffer_pool_instances set to match the number of CPU cores and the VM needs more RAM.

Currently we run on a VM with 4cpu and 8GB RAM. It cannot handle to manage Rancher with ~70 hosts and 700 containers. It is often in high CPU and swapping.

We will move to a larger VM with at least 16 GB RAM which will also have ~ 8 cpus. At least 11 GB ram will be given to innodb_buffer_pool_size and we will also set innodb_buffer_pool_instances to match the number of cpus.

More on https://taskman.eionet.europa.eu/issues/75376#change-212134

7

We have scaled vertically the host from 8GB to 16GB and increased the innodb_buffer_pool_size to 11GB and finally Rancher performance is fine. We don’t see anymore CPU spikes since there is enough RAM for both rancher server and the mysql db.

See attached image from our Check_mk monitoring system.

Check_MK omdeea-rancher-server.png789×819 284 KB