Mysql show no more than 5 concurrent connection

Question

I'm performing some load tests on my brand new server Apache/PHP/Mysql (Bitnami LAMP stack ). I'm using AWS with 1 EC2 instance behind a loadBalancer. At the moment I'm using loader.io for the tests. I'm testing a very simple API that perform this query:

select *,sleep(0.5) from debug limit 1

I added the sleep(0.5) because I wanted to see how the server behave with multiple concurrent connections and I found a bottleneck: if I run "SHOW PROCESSLIST" I can see only 5 process even if I have 10 concurrent user. The load test show that the connections are queued because the response time is growing during the test from 500 milliseconds to several seconds (depending on the duration of the test and the number of concurrent users).

I checked

select @@max_connections

and it's 151 (the default). max_user_connections is 0. What other parameter should I check to increase the number of concurrent connection on my DB?

If I run the test with 5 concurrent users, each one get a response in 500 milliseconds. If I add more concurrent users than the response time slow down.

If I run the load test on an API that does not access the DB there are no issues even with 400 concurrent users.

Monitoring with HTOP I see:

Tasks: 34, 245 thr; 2 running

Could be here the issue?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

The solution was actually very easy:

The Bitnami LAMP stack I'm using is configured with PHP-FPM, so the configuration is not on the apache side but in php/etc/common.conf

pm=ondemand
pm.max_children=5
pm.start_servers=2
pm.min_spare_servers=1
pm.max_spare_servers=3

inreasing the pm.max_children=5 solved the issue.

Answer 2

SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Max_used_connections';

will give the peak number of connections since mysqld started.

Do not run the benchmark as root. There is one extra connection reserved so that root can connect even when max_connections is reached.

As with most benchmarks, it is not measuring anything very related to real life. You are possibly blocking on the first row of debug.

SELECT SLEEP(0.5);

would not be hitting a table, so would probably fill up 151 connections (assuming you could launch them fast enough). Or you would find that you maxed out Apache' MaxClients. Or the benchmark program's capacity. You would find low CPU usage, etc.