I'm doing HTTP load testing benchmarks (using Apache Benchmark and Siege) on a small Java EE 1.7.0 / Tomcat 7.0.26 application running on a Debian Squeeze 6.0.4 x64 virtualized with Virtualbox 4.1.8. The computer host is Ubuntu 11.10 x64.

I've modified those parameters in the Tomcat server.xml :

<Connector 
    port="8080" 
    protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="200000"
    redirectPort="8443" 
    acceptCount="2000"
    maxThreads="150"
    minSpareThreads="50" />

The application executed on the server takes around 300ms.

This app is running well until a certain amount of concurrent connections like those one :

ab -n 500 -c 150 http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080/myapp/
ab -n 1000 -c 50 http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080/myapp/
siege -b -c 100 -r 20 http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080/myapp/ 

A lot of socket connection timed out happens and this completly overload the host processor (but the CPU load inside the VM is normal).

Doing an htop on the host, i can see that the Virtualbox processus is running under 300% CPU and never come down even after the load test is finished. (I've allocated 4 processors to the VM, if I allocate only one processor, CPU load goes under 100%).

Restarting Tomcat don't do anything, i'm forced to restart the whole VM.

I've tryed to launch those ab/siege commands locally on the VM and everything goes well.

I first thought it was related to a linux network limit as explained here: Running some benchmarks using ab, and tomcat starts to really slow down So I've modified those TCP parameters :

echo 15 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout
echo 30 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_intvl
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_tw_recycle
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_tw_reuse

It seems to be better, but it continues to overload the host CPU and output socket connections time out at a certain amount of concurrent connections.

I'm wondering if this is not related to how Virtualbox handles external concurrent connections.