Sadly, we have a number of places where we use varint encoding for
numbers that cannot be negative. We could have saved a bit by using
uvarint encoding. On the bright side, we now have a 50% chance to
detect data corruption. :-/
Fixes#1800 and #2492.
This is in line with the v1.5 change in paradigm to not keep
chunk.Descs without chunks around after a series maintenance.
It's mainly motivated by avoiding excessive amounts of RAM usage
during crash recovery.
The code avoids to create memory time series with zero chunk.Descs as
that is prone to trigger weird effects. (Series maintenance would
archive series with zero chunk.Descs, but we cannot do that here
because the archive indices still have to be checked.)
The fpIter was kind of cumbersome to use and required a lock for each
iteration (which wasn't even needed for the iteration at startup after
loading the checkpoint).
The new implementation here has an obvious penalty in memory, but it's
only 8 byte per series, so 80MiB for a beefy server with 10M memory
time series (which would probably need ~100GiB RAM, so the memory
penalty is only 0.1% of the total memory need).
The big advantage is that now series maintenance happens in order,
which leads to the time between two maintenances of the same series
being less random. Ideally, after each maintenance, the next
maintenance would tackle the series with the largest number of
non-persisted chunks. That would be quite an effort to find out or
track, but with the approach here, the next maintenance will tackle
the series whose previous maintenance is longest ago, which is a good
approximation.
While this commit won't change the _average_ number of chunks
persisted per maintenance, it will reduce the mean time a given chunk
has to wait for its persistence and thus reduce the steady-state
number of chunks waiting for persistence.
Also, the map iteration in Go is non-deterministic but not truly
random. In practice, the iteration appears to be somewhat "bucketed".
You can often observe a bunch of series with similar duration since
their last maintenance, i.e. you see batches of series with similar
number of chunks persisted per maintenance. If that batch is
relatively young, a whole lot of series are maintained with very few
chunks to persist. (See screenshot in PR for a better explanation.)
This is a fairly easy attempt to dynamically evict chunks based on the
heap size. A target heap size has to be set as a command line flage,
so that users can essentially say "utilize 4GiB of RAM, and please
don't OOM".
The -storage.local.max-chunks-to-persist and
-storage.local.memory-chunks flags are deprecated by this
change. Backwards compatibility is provided by ignoring
-storage.local.max-chunks-to-persist and use
-storage.local.memory-chunks to set the new
-storage.local.target-heap-size to a reasonable (and conservative)
value (both with a warning).
This also makes the metrics intstrumentation more consistent (in
naming and implementation) and cleans up a few quirks in the tests.
Answers to anticipated comments:
There is a chance that Go 1.9 will allow programs better control over
the Go memory management. I don't expect those changes to be in
contradiction with the approach here, but I do expect them to
complement them and allow them to be more precise and controlled. In
any case, once those Go changes are available, this code has to be
revisted.
One might be tempted to let the user specify an estimated value for
the RSS usage, and then internall set a target heap size of a certain
fraction of that. (In my experience, 2/3 is a fairly safe bet.)
However, investigations have shown that RSS size and its relation to
the heap size is really really complicated. It depends on so many
factors that I wouldn't even start listing them in a commit
description. It depends on many circumstances and not at least on the
risk trade-off of each individual user between RAM utilization and
probability of OOMing during a RAM usage peak. To not add even more to
the confusion, we need to stick to the well-defined number we also use
in the targeting here, the sum of the sizes of heap objects.
Currently, if a series stops to exist, its head chunk will be kept
open for an hour. That prevents it from being persisted. Which
prevents it from being evicted. Which prevents the series from being
archived.
Most of the time, once no sample has been added to a series within the
staleness limit, we can be pretty confident that this series will not
receive samples anymore. The whole chain as described above can be
started after 5m instead of 1h. In the relaxed case, this doesn't
change a lot as the head chunk timeout is only checked during series
maintenance, and usually, a series is only maintained every six
hours. However, there is the typical scenario where a large service is
deployed, the deoply turns out to be bad, and then it is deployed
again within minutes, and quite quickly the number of time series has
tripled. That's the point where the Prometheus server is stressed and
switches (rightfully) into rushed mode. In that mode, time series are
processed as quickly as possible, but all of that is in vein if all of
those recently ended time series cannot be persisted yet for another
hour. In that scenario, this change will help most, and it's exactly
the scenario where help is most desperately needed.
This is another corner-case that was previously never exercised
because the rewriting of a series file was never prevented by the
shrink ratio.
Scenario: There is an existing series on disk, which is archived. If a
new sample comes in for that file, a new chunk in memory is created,
and the chunkDescsOffset is set to -1. If series maintenance happens
before the series has at least one chunk to persist _and_ an
insufficient chunks on disk is old enough for purging (so that the
shrink ratio kicks in), dropAndPersistChunks would return 0, but it
should return the chunk length of the series file.
Also, in that code path, set chunkDescsOffset to 0 rather than -1 in
case of "dropped more chunks from persistence than from memory" so
that no other weird things happen before the series is quarantined for
good.
The append call may reuse cds, and thus change its len.
(In practice, this wouldn't happen as cds should have len==cap.
Still, the previous order of lines was problematic.)
This decreases checkpoint size by not checkpointing things
that don't actually need checkpointing.
This is fully compatible with the v2 checkpoint format,
as it makes series appear as though the only chunksdescs
in memory are those that need persisting.
Add metrics around checkpointing and persistence
* Add a metric to say if checkpointing is happening,
and another to track total checkpoint time and count.
This breaks the existing prometheus_local_storage_checkpoint_duration_seconds
by renaming it to prometheus_local_storage_checkpoint_last_duration_seconds
as the former name is more appropriate for a summary.
* Add metric for last checkpoint size.
* Add metric for series/chunks processed by checkpoints.
For long checkpoints it'd be useful to see how they're progressing.
* Add metric for dirty series
* Add metric for number of chunks persisted per series.
You can get the number of chunks from chunk_ops,
but not the matching number of series. This helps determine
the size of the writes being made.
* Add metric for chunks queued for persistence
Chunks created includes both chunks that'll need persistence
and chunks read in for queries. This only includes chunks created
for persistence.
* Code review comments on new persistence metrics.
When a large Prometheus starts up fresh it can take many minutes
to warmup and clear out the index queue. A larger queue means less
blocking, bigger batches and cuts down startup time by ~50%.
Keeping these around has two problems:
1) Each desc takes 64 bytes, 10 of them is 640B. This is a lot of
overhead on a 1024 byte chunk.
2) It can take well over a week to reach a point where this and thus
Prometheus memory usage as a whole enters steady state. This makes RAM
estimation very hard for users, and makes it difficult to investigate
things like memory fragmentation.
Instead we'll wipe them during each memory series maintenance cycle, and
if a query pulls them in they'll hang around as cache until the next
cycle.
Two cases:
- An unarchived metric must have at least one chunk desc loaded upon
unarchival. Otherwise, the file is gone or has size 0, which is an
inconsistency (because the series is still indexed in the archive
index). Hence, quarantining is triggered.
- If loading the chunk descs of a series with a known chunkDescsOffset
(i.e. != -1), the number of chunks loaded must be equal to
chunkDescsOffset. If not, there is a data corruption. An error is
returned, which leads to qurantining.
In any case, there is a guard added to not access the 1st element of
an empty chunkDescs slice. (That's what triggered the crashes in issue
2249.) A time series with unknown chunkDescsOffset and no chunks in
memory and no chunks on disk either could trigger that case. I would
assume such a "null series" doesn't exist, but it's not entirely
unthinkable and unreasonable to happen (perhaps in future uses of the
storage). (Create a series, and then something tries to preload chunks
before the first sample is added.)
