Performance impact of Simple Content Access and Red Hat Satellite

Updated

Simple Content Access (SCA) is a capability in Red Hat’s subscription tools which simplifies the behavior of the entitlement tooling, making it easier to consume the content provided by your Red Hat subscriptions without the complexity of configuring subscription tooling. More background can be found in our article on Simple Content Access.

Satellite itself benefits not only from usability improvements but some key performance metrics in frequently used operations.

Host Registration

In tests we have seen upwards of 5-10X speed improvements under load during host registration events. The specific operation that sees this improvement is the execution of subscription-manager register command.

Environment:

  • Satellite 6.10 server, 32GB RAM, 8xCPU
  • 2 Organizations populated in the Satellite database:
    • Org 1: Standard Subscription Model, 50,000 hosts registered
    • Org 2: Simple Content Access Subscription Model, 50,000 hosts registered

Test:

  • Performed a bulk registration test of 1000 registrations against each organization.
    • Org 1: Average 'subscription-manager register' time in minutes:seconds: 1:02
    • Org 2: Average 'subscription-manager register' time in minutes:seconds: 0:11

The timings are hardware and environment specific for any given Satellite but analysis concludes that the bulk of the time subscription-manager and the server spends during registration is assigning subscriptions. Without that we see registrations taking in the ~10 second range per host vs 1 minute or more.

Manifest refresh

Environment:

  • Satellite 6.10 server, 32GB RAM, 8xCPU
  • 2 Organizations populated in the Satellite database:
    • Org 1: Standard Subscription Model, 50,000 hosts registered
    • Org 2: Simple Content Access Subscription Model, 50,000 hosts registered

Test:

  • Click the "Refresh" button on the Content -> Subscriptions -> Manage Manifest user interface
    • Org 1: Average time in minutes:seconds to complete the refresh operation: 6 hours+
    • Org 2: Average time in minutes:seconds to complete the refresh operation: 31 seconds

As above, the timings are hardware and environment specific for any given Satellite but analysis shows that the refresh operation is highly impacted by the number of hosts registered.

Similar results have been seen with prior versions of Satellite including 6.9 and 6.8.

Article Type