I needed this today for debugging. It can certainly be improved, but
it's already quite helpful.
I refactored the reading of heads.db files out of persistence, which
is an improvement, too.
I made minor changes to the cli package to allow outputting via the
io.Writer interface.
Fixes https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/1401
This remove the last (and in fact bogus) use of BoundaryValues.
Thus, a whole lot of unused (and arguably sub-optimal / ugly) code can
be removed here, too.
In a way, our instants were also ranges, just with the staleness delta
as range length. They are no treated equally, just that in one case,
the range length is set as range, in the other the staleness
delta. However, there are "real" instants where start and and time of
a query is the same. In those cases, we only want to return a single
value (the one closest before or at the equal start and end time). If
that value is the last sample in the series, odds are we have it
already in the series object. In that case, there is no need to pin or
load any chunks. A special singleSampleSeriesIterator is created for
that. This should greatly speed up instant queries as they happen
frequently for rule evaluations.
This implies a slight change of behavior as only samples added to the
respective instance of a memorySeries are returned. However, this is
most likely anyway what we want.
Following cases:
- Server has been restarted: Given the time it takes to cleanly
shutdown and start up a server, the series are now stale anyway. An
improved staleness handling (still to be implemented) will be based
on tracking if a given target is continuing to expose samples for a
given time series. In that case, we need a full scrape cycle to
decide about staleness. So again, it makes sense to consider
everything stale directly after a server restart.
- Series unarchived due to a read request: The series is definitely
stale so we don't want to return anything anyway.
- Freshly created time series or series unarchived because of a sample
append: That happens because appending a sample is imminent. Before
the fingerprint lock is released, the series will have received a
sample, and lastSamplePair will always returned the expected value.
Formalize ZeroSamplePair as return value for non-existing samples.
Change LastSamplePairForFingerprint to return a SamplePair (and not a
pointer to it), which saves allocations in a potentially extremely
frequent call.
This will fix issue #1035 and will also help to make issue #1264 less
bad.
The fundamental problem in the current code:
In the preload phase, we quite accurately determine which chunks will
be used for the query being executed. However, in the subsequent step
of creating series iterators, the created iterators are referencing
_all_ in-memory chunks in their series, even the un-pinned ones. In
iterator creation, we copy a pointer to each in-memory chunk of a
series into the iterator. While this creates a certain amount of
allocation churn, the worst thing about it is that copying the chunk
pointer out of the chunkDesc requires a mutex acquisition. (Remember
that the iterator will also reference un-pinned chunks, so we need to
acquire the mutex to protect against concurrent eviction.) The worst
case happens if a series doesn't even contain any relevant samples for
the query time range. We notice that during preloading but then we
will still create a series iterator for it. But even for series that
do contain relevant samples, the overhead is quite bad for instant
queries that retrieve a single sample from each series, but still go
through all the effort of series iterator creation. All of that is
particularly bad if a series has many in-memory chunks.
This commit addresses the problem from two sides:
First, it merges preloading and iterator creation into one step,
i.e. the preload call returns an iterator for exactly the preloaded
chunks.
Second, the required mutex acquisition in chunkDesc has been greatly
reduced. That was enabled by a side effect of the first step, which is
that the iterator is only referencing pinned chunks, so there is no
risk of concurrent eviction anymore, and chunks can be accessed
without mutex acquisition.
To simplify the code changes for the above, the long-planned change of
ValueAtTime to ValueAtOrBefore time was performed at the same
time. (It should have been done first, but it kind of accidentally
happened while I was in the middle of writing the series iterator
changes. Sorry for that.) So far, we actively filtered the up to two
values that were returned by ValueAtTime, i.e. we invested work to
retrieve up to two values, and then we invested more work to throw one
of them away.
The SeriesIterator.BoundaryValues method can be removed once #1401 is
fixed. But I really didn't want to load even more changes into this
PR.
Benchmarks:
The BenchmarkFuzz.* benchmarks run 83% faster (i.e. about six times
faster) and allocate 95% fewer bytes. The reason for that is that the
benchmark reads one sample after another from the time series and
creates a new series iterator for each sample read.
To find out how much these improvements matter in practice, I have
mirrored a beefy Prometheus server at SoundCloud that suffers from
both issues #1035 and #1264. To reach steady state that would be
comparable, the server needs to run for 15d. So far, it has run for
1d. The test server currently has only half as many memory time series
and 60% of the memory chunks the main server has. The 90th percentile
rule evaluation cycle time is ~11s on the main server and only ~3s on
the test server. However, these numbers might get much closer over
time.
In addition to performance improvements, this commit removes about 150
LOC.
The First time is kind of trivial as we always know it when we create
a new chunkDesc.
The last time is only know when the chunk is closed, so we have to set
it at that time.
The change saves a lot of digging down into the chunk
itself. Especially the last time is relative expensive as it involves
the creation of an iterator. The first time access now doesn't require
locking, which is also a nice gain.
This gives up on the idea to communicate throuh the Append() call (by
either not returning as it is now or returning an error as
suggested/explored elsewhere). Here I have added a Throttled() call,
which has the advantage that it can be called before a whole _batch_
of Append()'s. Scrapes will happen completely or not at all. Same for
rule group evaluations. That's a highly desired behavior (as discussed
elsewhere). The code is even simpler now as the whole ingestion buffer
could be removed.
Logging of throttled mode has been streamlined and will create at most
one message per minute.
Since we are not overestimating the number of chunks to persist
anymore, this commit also adjusts the default value for
-storage.local.memory-chunks. Update of documentation will follow.
"Rushed mode" is formerly known as "degraded mode", which is changed
with this commit, too. The name "degraded" was very misleading.
Also, switch into rushed mode if we have too many chunks in memory and
an at least reasonable amount of chunks to persist so that speeding up
persisting chunks can help.
If only very few chunks are to be truncated from a very large series
file, the rewrite of the file is a lorge overhead. With this change, a
certain ratio of the file has to be dropped to make it happen. While
only causing disk overhead at about the same ratio (by default 10%),
it will cut down I/O by a lot in above scenario.
The test had become flaky with Go1.5.
Theory here is that with Go1.5.x, sleeping for 10ms might not be
enough to wake up another goroutine, possibly because it is used for
GC. 50ms should always be enough due to GC pause guarantees with the
new GC.
This is with `golint -min_confidence=0.5`.
I left several lint warnings untouched because they were either
incorrect or I felt it was better not to change them at the moment.
