So far, the last sample in a chunk was saved twice. That's required
for adding more samples as we need to know the last sample added to
add more samples without iterating through the whole chunk. However,
once the last sample was added to the chunk before it's full, there is
no need to save it twice. Thus, the very last sample added to a chunk
can _only_ be saved in the header fields for the last sample. The
chunk has to be identifiable as closed, then. This information has
been added to the flags byte.
This improves fuzz testing in two ways:
(1) More realistic time stamps. So far, the most common case in
practice was very rare in the test: Completely regular increases of
the timestamp.
(2) Verify samples by scanning through the whole relevant section of
the series.
For Gorilla-like chunks, this showed two things:
(1) With more regularly increasing time stamps, BenchmarkFuzz is
essentially as fast as with the traditional chunks:
```
BenchmarkFuzzChunkType0-8 2 972514684 ns/op 83426196 B/op 2500044 allocs/op
BenchmarkFuzzChunkType1-8 2 971478001 ns/op 82874660 B/op 2512364 allocs/op
BenchmarkFuzzChunkType2-8 2 999339453 ns/op 76670636 B/op 2366116 allocs/op
```
(2) There was a bug related to when and how the chunk footer is
overwritten to make use for the last sample. This wasn't exposed by
random access as the last sample of a chunk is retrieved from the
values in the header in that case.
This is not a verbatim implementation of the Gorilla encoding. First
of all, it could not, even if we wanted, because Prometheus has a
different chunking model (constant size, not constant time). Second,
this adds a number of changes that improve the encoding in general or
at least for the specific use case of Prometheus (and are partially
only possible in the context of Prometheus). See comments in the code
for details.
It is now also used in label matching, so the name of the metric
changed from `prometheus_local_storage_invalid_preload_requests_total`
to `non_existent_series_matches_total'.
Only return an error where callers are doing something with it except
simply logging and ignoring.
All the errors touched in this commit flag the storage as dirty
anyway, and that fact is logged anyway. So most of what is being
removed here is just log spam.
As discussed earlier, the class of errors that flags the storage as
dirty signals fundamental corruption, no even bubbling up a one-time
warning to the user (e.g. about incomplete results) isn't helping much
because _anything_ happening in the storage has to be doubted from
that point on (and in fact retroactively into the past, too). Flagging
the storage dirty, and alerting on it (plus marking the state in the
web UI) is the only way I can see right now.
As a byproduct, I cleaned up the setDirty method a bit and improved
the logged errors.
WIP: This needs more tests.
It now gets a from and through value, which it may opportunistically
use to optimize the retrieval. With possible future range indices,
this could be used in a very efficient way. This change merely applies
some easy checks, which should nevertheless solve the use case of
heavy rule evaluations on servers with a lot of series churn.
Idea is the following:
- Only archive series that are at least as old as the headChunkTimeout
(which was already extremely unlikely to happen).
- Then maintain a high watermark for the last archival, i.e. no
archived series has a sample more recent than that watermark.
- Any query that doesn't reach to a time before that watermark doesn't
have to touch the archive index at all. (A production server at
Soundcloud with the aforementioned series churn and heavy rule
evaluations spends 50% of its CPU time in archive index
lookups. Since rule evaluations usually only touch very recent
values, most of those lookup should disappear with this change.)
- Federation with a very broad label matcher will profit from this,
too.
As a byproduct, the un-needed MetricForFingerprint method was removed
from the Storage interface.
This finally extracts all the common code of the two chunk iterators
into one. Any future chunk encodings with fast access by index can use
the same iterator by simply providing an indexAccessor. Other future
chunk encodings without fast index access (like Gorilla-style) can
still implement the chunkIterator interface as usual.
For one, remove unneeded methods.
Then, instead of using a channel for all values, use a
bufio.Scanner-like interface. This removes the need for creating a
goroutine and avoids the (unnecessary) locking performed by channel
sending and receiving.
This will make it much easier to write new chunk implementations (like
Gorilla-style encoding).
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.
This fixes https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/1059 , but
not in the obvious way (simply not updating the persist watermark,
because that's actually not that simple - we don't really know what
has gone wrong exactly). As any errors relevant here are most likely
caused by severe and unrecoverable problems with the series file,
Using the now quarantine feature is the right step. We don't really
have to be worried about any inconsistent state of the series because
it will be removed for good ASAP. Another plus is that we don't have
to declare the whole storage dirty anymore.
This requires all the panic calls upon unexpected data to be converted
into errors returned. This pollute the function signatures quite
lot. Well, this is Go...
The ideas behind this are the following:
- panic only if it's a programming error. Data corruptions happen, and
they are not programming errors.
- If we detect a data corruption, we "quarantine" the series,
essentially removing it from the database and putting its data into
a separate directory for forensics.
- Failure during writing to a series file is not considered corruption
automatically. It will call setDirty, though, so that a
crashrecovery upon the next restart will commence and check for
that.
- Series quarantining and setDirty calls are logged and counted in
metrics, but are hidden from the user of the interfaces in
interface.go, whith the notable exception of Append(). The reasoning
is that we treat corruption by removing the corrupted series, i.e. a
query for it will return no results on its next call anyway, so
return no results right now. In the case of Append(), we want to
tell the user that no data has been appended, though.
Minor side effects:
- Now consistently using filepath.* instead of path.*.
- Introduced structured logging where I touched it. This makes things
less consistent, but a complete change to structured logging would
be out of scope for this PR.
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.
