再临华美 Hua Mui Revisited

既然到了新山，我当然会去华美，吃吃它的面包，喝喝它的咖啡，体验殖民地风情，享受慵懒的午后气氛。
Been to Hua Mui once more! Yummy Yummy Hua Mui


外观
Hua Mui here i come again!


内观


内观


非常殖民地风味
Love the colonization era feel. It reminds me this restaurant is close to 100 years old.


叫了杯茶c
I ordered Teh-C. Good. Very Kow.


叫了面包，好吃好吃。
The toast banyak bagus! Delicious. Enak betul.

访新山华族历史文物馆失败记

上个星期五，心血来潮往新山去。既然到了新山，就想顺道去看看不久前开张的新山华族历史文物馆。找了好久才发现那馆近在尺尺。既然没开！大失所望！

没关系，下次再来。

拍了一张外观照。

永平福州鱼丸 Yong Peng FuZhou Fish Ball

哇，首尝福州鱼丸。
Yummy. First time eating FuZhou fish ball.

以往多次路经永平，对荣凯的西刀鱼丸鱼饼情有独钟，所以无缘尝试其他店的鱼丸。
I love XiDao Fish Ball. I used to eat a lot of XiDao Fish Ball & Fish Cake at a shop called Antony's every time i traveled back to my home town.

这次由于已近晚上十点，荣凯已闭门休息。唯有试试别家鱼丸，找上了这间。
Last Friday night at 10pm, i wanted to have dinner at Antony's, which had already closed. Therefore i had my dinner at this shop (i have forgotten the shop name).

其干面与鱼丸配搭没荣凯出色，其鱼饼似乎与荣凯的同出一源。让我欢喜的是那一晚福州鱼丸。鱼丸里头裹着猪肉，是新发明吧？非同凡响，值得一试！
There is a piece of meat inside the fish ball. New invention? Worth trying!

Load Test

Past few days i encountered one serious production issue, which the web service timeout before the backend process sent back the message to the SOAP response node in WMB flow. This was due to the high load in production that caused the delay in the backend process.

The whole process is: WMB flow extracts SOAP request message, turns it into a MQ Header message, puts the message to Java adaptor's request queue, then Java adaptor processes the content and puts a response message to the response queue, then WMB flow will read the message in the response queue and will turn it into a SOAP response.

In the progress of investigation, we decided to move one database query out from the java adaptor program to the WMB flow. The reason being is sometimes the db connection will just drop and the java adaptor program has to spend some time reinitiating the db connection. In fact according to the time recorded in the adaptor's log the process was still quite fast, it's even within miliseconds. Well we just gave it a try.

After making all the necessary changes we deployed the works to the testing environment. I then performed some load tests to the web service. The result was negative. The tps was around 3.5 but the average time taken was > 10 seconds and we had to achieve < 10 seconds! So still plenty of work to do :(

We performed a few cycles of investigation, trial and error & testing until we found the solution - increasing the WMB flow instance. This is a setting in the WMB Toolkit. So we increased the number of instances to 3. This time we managed to achieve an average time of 3 seconds! We were so happy and excited!

What about the cause? See below:

There were many messages piling at the response queue which is supposed to be read by the WMB flow. These messages were sent in by the Java Adaptor after it finished processing the data. Apparently these messages were not picked up by the WMB flow in time hence causing the timeout error. By increasing the WMB flow instance, concurrently there are 3 identical WMB flows reading the content of this queue, hence problem resolved!

I was really relieved!