Salt Rate Limiting

There are two parameters that control how actions are sent to clients, one for the batch size, and one for the delay.

When the SUSE Manager Server sends a batch of actions to the target clients, it will send it to the number of clients determined in the batch size parameter. After the specified delay period, commands will be sent to the next batch of clients. The number of clients in each subsequent batch is equal to the number of clients that have completed in the previous batch.

Choosing a lower batch size will reduce system load and parallelism, but might reduce overall performance for processing actions.

The batch size parameter sets the maximum number of clients that can execute a single action at the same time. Adjust the java.salt_batch_size parameter. Defaults to 200.

Increasing the delay increases the chance that multiple clients will have completed before the next action is issued (more clients are grouped together in subsequent batches), resulting in fewer overall commands, and reducing load.

The batch delay parameter sets the amount of time, in seconds, to wait after a command from the previous batch is processed before beginning to process the command on the next client. Adjust the java.salt_batch_delay parameter. Defaults to 1.0 seconds.

In older versions, SUSE Manager used a tool called Salt mine to check client availability. The Salt mine would cause clients to contact the server every hour, which created significant load. With the introduction of a more efficient mechanism in SUSE Manager 3.2, the Salt mine is no longer required. Instead, the SUSE Manager Server uses Taskomatic to ping only the clients that appear to have been offline for twelve hours or more, with all clients being contacted at least once in every twenty four hour period by default. You can adjust this by changing the web.system_checkin_threshold parameter in rhn.conf. The value is expressed in days, and the default value is 1.

Newly registered Salt clients will have the Salt mine disabled by default. If the Salt mine is running on your system, you can reduce load by disabling it. This is especially effective if you have a large number of clients.

Disable the Salt mine by running this command on the server:

This will restart the clients and generate some Salt events to be processed by the server. If you have a large number of clients, handling these events could create excessive load. To avoid this, you can execute the command in batch mode with this command:

You will need to wait for this command to finish executing. Do not end the process with Ctrl+C.