Re: [naviserver-devel] naviserver with connection thread queue

[Gustaf N. <ne...@wu...>]

Dear all,

here is a short update of the findings and changes since last week.

One can now activate for nslog "logpartialtimes", which adds an entry to 
the access log containing the partial request times (accept time, 
queuing time, and run time). The sample site runs now with minthreads == 
5, maxthreads 10.

If one analyzes the data of one day of our sample site, one can see that 
in this case, the accept time is always 0 (this is caused by nsssl, 
which is a sync driver, header parsing happens solely in the connection 
thread), the queue time is on average 54 ms (milliseconds), which is 
huge, while the median is 0.1 ms. The reason is that we can see a 
maximum queue time of 21 secs! As a consequence, the standard deviation 
is as well huge. When one looks more closely to the log file, one can 
see that at times, when the queuing time is huge, as well the runtime is 
often huge, leading to cascading effects as described below. cause and 
reason are hard to determine, since we saw large runtimes even on 
delivery of rather small times

	accept	queue	run	total
avg	0,0000	0,0547	0,2656	0,3203
stdev	0,0000	0,7481	0,9740	1,4681
min	0,0000	0,0000	0,0134	0,0135
max	0,0000	21,9594	16,6905	29,1668
median	0,0000	0,0001	0,0329	0,0330

The causes for the "random" slow cases are at least from two sources: 
slow delivery (some clients are slow in retrieving data, especially some 
bots seems to be bad) and system specific latencies (e.g. backup 
running, other servers becoming active, etc.). To address this problem, 
i moved more file deliveries to the writer thread (reducing writersize) 
and activated TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT. One sees significant improvements, the 
average queuing time is 4.6 ms, but still the standard deviation is 
huge, caused by some "erratic" some large times.

	accept	queue	run	total
avg	0,0000	0,0046	0,1538	0,1583
stdev	0,0000	0,0934	0,6868	0,6967
min	0,0000	0,0000	0,0137	0,0138
max	0,0000	4,6041	22,4101	22,4102
median	0,0000	0,0001	0,0216	0,0217

There are still some huge values, and the queuing time was "lucky" not 
to be influenced by the still large runtimes of requests. Aside of the 
top values, one sees sometimes unexplained delays of a few seconds. 
which seem to block everything.

A large source for latencies is the file system. On our production 
system we already invested some efforts to tune the file system in the 
past, such we don't see effects as large as on this sample site. Since 
NaviServer should work well also on non-tuned file systems, i 
implemented an async writer thread, that decouples writing to files 
(access.log and error.log) from the connection threads. The interface is 
the same as unix write(), but does not block.

I have this running since yesterday evening on the sample site, and do 
far, it seems to help to reduce the random latencies significantly. i'll 
wait with posting data until i have a similar time range to compare, 
maybe the good times i am seeing are accidentally.

I have not yet looked into the details for handling the async writer 
withing logrotate and shutdown.

On another front, i was experimenting with jemalloc and tcmalloc.
Previously we had the following figures, using tcl as distributed with 
zippy malloc

   with minthreads=2, maxthreads=2
       requests 10307 spools 1280 queued 2704 connthreads 11 rss 425

When changing minthreads to 5, maxthreads 10, but using jemalloc,
one sees the following figures

    requests 3933 spools 188 queued 67 connthreads 7 rss 488
    requests 6325 spools 256 queued 90 connthreads 9 rss 528
    requests 10021 spools 378 queued 114 connthreads 14 rss 530

It is interesting to see, that with always 5 connections threads running 
and using jemalloc, we see a rss consumption only slightly larger than 
with plain tcl and zippy malloc having maxthreads == 2, having less 
requests queued.

Similarly, with tcmalloc we see with minthreads to 5, maxthreads 10

    requests 2062 spools 49 queued 3 connthreads 6 rss 376
    requests 7743 spools 429 queued 359 connthreads 11 rss 466
    requests 8389 spools 451 queued 366 connthreads 12 rss 466

which is even better.

For more information on malloc tests see
https://next-scripting.org/xowiki/docs/misc/thread-mallocs
or the tcl-core mailing list.

That's all for now

-gustaf neumann

Am 20.11.12 20:07, schrieb Gustaf Neumann:
> Dear all,
>
>> The idea of controlling the number of running threads via queuing 
>> latency is interesting, but i have to look into the details before i 
>> can comment on this.
> before one can consider controlling the number of running threads via 
> queuing latency, one has to improve the awareness in NaviServer about 
> the various phases in the requests lifetime.
>
> In the experimental version, we have now the following time stamps 
> recorded:
>
> -  acceptTime (the time, a socket was accepted)
> -  requestQueueTime (the time the request was queued; was startTime)
> -  requestDequeueTime (the time the request was dequeued)
>
> The difference between requestQueueTime and acceptTime is the setup 
> cost and depends on the amount of work, the driver does. For instance, 
> nssock of naviserver performs read-ahead, while nsssl does not and 
> passes connection right away. So, the previously used startTime (which 
> is acctually the time the request was queued) was for drivers with 
> read ahead not correct. In the experimental version, [ns_conn start] 
> returns now always the accept time.
>
> The next paragraph uses the term endTime, which is the time, when a 
> connection thread is done with a request (either the content was 
> delivered, or the content was handed over to a writer thread).
>
> The difference between requestDequeueTime and requestQueueTime is the 
> time spent in the queue. The difference between endTime and 
> requestDequeueTime is the pure runtime, the difference between endTime 
> and acceptTime is the totalTime. As a rough approximation the time 
> between requestDequeueTime and acceptTime is pretty much influenced by 
> the server setup, and the runtime by the application. I used the term 
> "approximation" since the runtime of certain other requests influences 
> the queuing time, as we see in the following:
>
> Consider a server with two running connection threads receiving 6 
> requests, where requests 2-5 are received in a very short time. The 
> first three requests are directly assign to connection threads, have 
> fromQueue == 0. These have queuing times between 88 and 110 micro 
> seconds, which includes signal sending/receiving, thread change, and 
> initial setup in the connection thread. The runtimes for these 
> requests are pretty bad, in the range of 0.24 to 3.8 seconds elapsed time.
> [1] waiting 0 current 2 idle 1 ncons 999 fromQueue 0 accept 0.000000 queue 0.000110 run 0.637781 total 0.637891
> [2] waiting 3 current 2 idle 0 ncons 998 fromQueue 0 accept 0.000000 queue 0.000090 run 0.245030 total 0.245120
> [3] waiting 2 current 2 idle 0 ncons 987 fromQueue 0 accept 0.000000 queue 0.000088 run 0.432421 total 0.432509
> [4] waiting 1 current 2 idle 0 ncons 997 fromQueue 1 accept 0.000000 queue 0.244246 run 0.249208 total 0.493454
> [5] waiting 0 current 2 idle 0 ncons 986 fromQueue 1 accept 0.000000 queue 0.431545 run 3.713331 total 4.144876
> [6] waiting 0 current 2 idle 0 ncons 996 fromQueue 1 accept 0.000000 queue 0.480382 run 3.799818 total 4.280200
>
> Requests [4, 5, 6] are queued, and have queuing times between 0.2 and 
> 0.5 seconds. The queuing times are pretty much the runtimes of [2, 3, 
> 4], therefore the runtime determines the queuing time. For example, 
> the totalTime of request [4] was 0.493454 secs, half of the time it 
> was waiting in the queue. Request [4] can consider itself happy that 
> it was not scheduled after [5] or [6], where its totalTime would have 
> been likely in the range of 4 secs (10 times slower). Low waiting 
> times are essential for good performance.
>
> This example shows pretty well the importance of aync delivery 
> mechanisms like the writer thread or bgdelivery in OpenACS. A file 
> being delivered by the connection thread over a slow internet 
> connection might block later requests substantially (as in the cases 
> above). This is even more important for todays web-sites, where a 
> single view might entail 60+ embedded requests for js, css, images, 
> .... where it is not feasible to defined hundreds of connection threads.
>
> Before going further into detail i'll provide further introspection 
> mechanism to the experimental version.
>
>  - [ns_server stats] adding total waiting time
>  - [ns_conn queuetime] ... time spent in queue
>  - [ns_conn dequeue]  ... time stamp when the req starts to actually 
> run (similar to [ns_conn start])
>
> The first can be used for server monitoring, the next two for single 
> connection introspection. The queuetime can be useful for better 
> awareness and for optional output in the access log, and the dequeue 
> time-stamp for application level profiling as base for a difference 
> with current time.
>
> Further wishes, suggestions, comments?
>
> -gustaf neumann
>