HostBill Queue Performance

Introduction

To improve front-end performance HostBill executes long-running tasks in background queue. Those include, but not limit to:

• Account provisioning, terminations, suspensions, upgrades etc.
• Domain actions - registration, transfers, renewals etc.
• Messaging - emails, sms, mobile notifications etc.
• Updating counters, stats, cache etc.

When installing its required to add crontab entry to run queue.php file every minute.

Improving Queue Performance

If you check Extras → System Logs → Task queue log in your HostBill, and find that there is a lot of tasks in Pending state, it means that queue is not performing well, which is caused by too-few queue workers available. To fix:

• Non enterprise-install
  (HostBill installed manually - not trough install.sh script; HostBill installed on control panel account; i.e: on cPanel)
  • If its possible on your environment, try to install PHP extensions: POSIX and PCNTL. 
    Make sure that those extension functions like pcntl_fork are in disable_functions php.ini declaration for web, and are not disabled for cli usage.

  • If option above is not possible to do, duplicate cron entry for queue.php multiple times (ie 5x):

    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php
    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php
    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php
    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php
    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php

• Enterprise install
  (HostBill installed trough install.sh script, required php extensions are already in place) 
  If particular queue is not performing well (ie. Mailing queue is too slow) you can increase number of workers that this queue have active at once.To do so:
  • Login to your HostBill server trough ssh.
  • Switch to HostBill user ( # su hostbill )

  • Run queue.php with -h argument to get list of queue options:

    php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php -h

  • In response to command above find argument responsible for setting number of workers on queue you wish to increase, ie: --hb_mail_queue=NUMBER
  • Edit crontab ( # crontab -e -u hostbill ) for HostBill user

  • To queue.php entry add argument with increased number of workers on queue you wish to speed up, like:
     

    * * * * * php -q /path/to/hb/queue.php --hb_mail_queue=6