InfoScale™ 9.0 Cluster Server Administrator's Guide - Windows

How the VCS engine (HAD) affects performance

The VCS engine, HAD, runs as a daemon process. By default it runs as a high-priority process, which ensures it sends heartbeats to kernel components and responds quickly to failures. HAD runs logging activities in a separate thread to reduce the performance impact on the engine due to logging.

VCS runs in a loop waiting for messages from agents, ha commands, the graphical user interfaces, and the other systems. Under normal conditions, the number of messages processed by HAD is few. They mainly include heartbeat messages from agents and update messages from the global counter. VCS may exchange additional messages when an event occurs, but typically overhead is nominal even during events. Note that this depends on the type of event; for example, a resource fault may involve taking the group offline on one system and bringing it online on another system. A system fault invokes failing over all online service groups on the faulted system.

To continuously monitor VCS status, use the VCS graphical user interfaces or the command hastatus. Both methods maintain connection to VCS and register for events, and are more efficient compared to running commands like hastatus -summary or hasys in a loop.

The number of clients connected to VCS can affect performance if several events occur simultaneously. For example, if five GUI processes are connected to VCS, VCS sends state updates to all five. Maintaining fewer client connections to VCS reduces this overhead.