How to Improve ‘ cf push’ Performance When Deplyoing Applications to Diego Cells

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs
• VMware Tanzu Application Service
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

A user wants to reduce the time of application deployment to a Diego Cell when using the command ‘cf push’.

Cause

There are numerous factors that can affect 'cf push' operations.  This involves taking a multi-facetted approach to understanding and increasing the speed at which apps are deployed on a given Diego Cell.  

Resolution

To improve the speed of ‘cf push’ operations, users can consider the following recommendations:

 

1. Clean Up Unused Buildpacks to Reduce Overhead
   • Too many buildpacks can increase the time it takes for platform to detect and push the intended.
   • Recommendation: Use below command to delete unnecessary buildpacks: 
     

     cf delete-buildpack <BUILDPACK_NAME>

2. Increase the Resources of Diego Cell
   • If Diego Cells have memory and/or ephemeral disk inadequacies, this can constrain the I/O and swap usage during staging process.
   • Recommendation: Ensure the Deigo Cells are configured with at least 32G of memory and a larger ephemeral disk sized to support buildpack extraction and staging process.
3. Specify Buildpacks in Manifest (Explicitly)
   • If there is no buildpack specified, Cloud Foundry in turn trys to detect on by sequentially downloading and testing every available buildpack on the Diego Cell. This process can notably slow the slow staging events.
   • Recommendation: Specify a single buildpack or limited one in the manifest.yml:
      

     # Example below:
      -------------------------
     buildpacks:
        - python_buildpack
     --------------------------

4. Scale Cloud Controller VMs
   • Specifically, the user is seeing intermittent timeouts or overall slowness during push operations.
   • Recommendation: Adding more Cloud Controller VMs can help balance the load.
5. Update Platform Versions
   • If the above steps do not help, consider upgrading TAS to latest version possible. Each TAS release will often include performance and platform optimizations identified from previous releases.
   • Recommendation: The short term approach to this includes upgrading minor version of TAS.  The long term approach includes upgrading to latest major version of TAS.

If the issue is not resolved using above methods, please contact TANZU Support.

Additional Information

1.) Cloud Foundry troubleshooting doc regarding application deployment and health:

• https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/deploy-apps/troubleshoot-app-health.html

2.) Broadcom documentation for deploying large apps (users will need to specify TAS version at top of this webpage):

• https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-tanzu/platform/tanzu-platform-for-cloud-foundry/6-0/tpcf/deploy-apps-large-app-deploy.html

3.) Additional information for GCP (Google) and AWS (Amazon) infrastructure users:

• https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/298362/cf-push-command-is-slow-and-takes-a-long.html#:~:text=The%20cf%20push%20command%20still,reduce%20the%20cf%20push%20times.
  
  

4.) KB article: 'How to see in the logs where the time is being spent using cf buildpack commands'.