With the squaring of the timestamp, we run into the
limitations of the 53bit mantissa for a 64bit float.
By subtracting away a timestamp of one of the samples (which is how the
intercept is used) we avoid this issue in practice as it's unlikely
that it is used over a very long time range.
Fixes#2674
Make the timestamp of instant vectors be the timestamp of the sample
rather than the evaluation. We were not using this anywhere, so this is
safe.
Add a function to return the timestamp of samples in an instant vector.
Fixes#1557
This was only relevant so far for the benchmark suite as it would
recycle Expr for repetitions. However, the append is unnecessary as
each node is only inspected once when populating iterators, and
population must always start from scratch.
This also introduces error checking during benchmarks and fixes the so
far undetected test errors during benchmarking.
Also, remove a style nit (two golint warnings less…).
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.
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 new implementation detects the start and end of a series by
looking at the average sample interval within the range. If the first
(last) sample in the range is more than 1.1*interval distant from the
beginning (end) of the range, it is considered the first (last) sample
of the series as a whole, and extrapolation is limited to half the
interval (rather than all the way to the beginning (end) of the
range). In addition, if the extrapolated starting point of a counter
(where it is zero) is within the range, it is used as the starting
point of the series.
Fixes#581
