investigating server performance

requirements:

• docker
• opentelemetry libraries

uv pip install opentelemetry-api \
                opentelemetry-sdk \
                opentelemetry-exporter-otlp \
                opentelemetry-instrumentation-sqlalchemy \
                opentelemetry-instrumentation-fastapi

note

allow the following scripts to run via chmod +x (or similar)

./load_testing/local-telemetry/start
./load_testing/run-server.sh
./load_testing/populate-server.sh

start the local telemetry stack

./load_testing/local-telemetry/start

run the server with tracing

You can run the server with either SQLite (default) or PostgreSQL using the run-server.sh script:

# Run with SQLite (default)
./load_testing/run-server.sh

# Run with PostgreSQL 15
./load_testing/run-server.sh postgres:15

The script will:

• For SQLite: Use the default SQLite configuration
• For PostgreSQL:
  • Start a Docker container with the specified version
  • Configure the database connection
  • Handle container lifecycle (reuse if possible, recreate if version changes)

If you need to run the server manually, here are the environment variables used:

prefect config set PREFECT_API_URL=http://localhost:4200/api

unset $(env | grep OTEL_ | cut -d= -f1)
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=prefect-server
export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc
export OTEL_LOG_LEVEL=debug
export PYTHONPATH=src

populate the server

create a work pool and some deployments

./load_testing/populate-server.sh

start a worker

prefect worker start --pool local