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.
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.
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.
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.
If all samples in consecutive chunks have the same timestamp, the way
we used to load chunks will fail. With this change, the persist
watermark is used to load the right amount of chunkDescs from disk.
This bug is a possible reason for the rare storage corruption we have
observed.
Fixes https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/481
While doing so, clean up and fix a few other things:
- Fix `go vet` warnings (@fabxc to blame ;).
- Fix a racey problem with unarchiving: Whenever we unarchive a
series, we essentially want to do something with it. However, until
we have done something with it, it appears like a series that is
ready to be archived or even purged. So e.g. it would be ignored
during checkpointing. With this fix, we always load the chunkDescs
upon unarchiving. This is wasteful if we only want to add a new
sample to an archived time series, but the (presumably more common)
case where we access an archived time series in a query doesn't
become more expensive.
- The change above streamlined the getOrCreateSeries ond
newMemorySeries flow. Also, the modTime is now always set correctly.
- Fix the leveldb-backed implementation of KeyValueStore.Delete. It
had the wrong behavior of still returning true, nil if a
non-existing key has been passed in.
This change is conceptually very simple, although the diff is large. It
switches logging from "github.com/golang/glog" to
"github.com/prometheus/log", while not actually changing any log
messages. V(1)-style logging has been changed to be log.Debug*().
Also, clean up some things in the code (especially introduction of the
chunkLenWithHeader constant to avoid the same expression all over the place).
Benchmark results:
BEFORE
BenchmarkLoadChunksSequentially 5000 283580 ns/op 152143 B/op 312 allocs/op
BenchmarkLoadChunksRandomly 20000 82936 ns/op 39310 B/op 99 allocs/op
BenchmarkLoadChunkDescs 10000 110833 ns/op 15092 B/op 345 allocs/op
AFTER
BenchmarkLoadChunksSequentially 10000 146785 ns/op 152285 B/op 315 allocs/op
BenchmarkLoadChunksRandomly 20000 67598 ns/op 39438 B/op 103 allocs/op
BenchmarkLoadChunkDescs 20000 99631 ns/op 12636 B/op 192 allocs/op
Note that everything is obviously loaded from the page cache (as the
benchmark runs thousands of times with very small series files). In a
real-world scenario, I expect a larger impact, as the disk operations
will more often actually hit the disk. To load ~50 sequential chunks,
this reduces the iops from 100 seeks and 100 reads to 1 seek and 1
read.
A number of mostly minor things:
- Rename chunk type -> chunk encoding.
- After all, do not carry around the chunk encoding to all parts of
the system, but just have one place where the encoding for new
chunks is set based on the flag. The new approach has caveats as
well, but the polution of so many method signatures is worse.
- Use the default chunk encoding for new chunks of existing
series. (Previously, only new _series_ would get chunks with the
default encoding.)
- Use an enum for chunk encoding. (But keep the version number for the
flag, for reasons discussed previously.)
- Add encoding() to the chunk interface (so that a chunk knows its own
encoding - no need to have that in a different top-level function).
- Got rid of newFollowUpChunk (which would keep the existing encoding
for all chunks of a time series). Now only use newChunk(), which
will create a chunk encoding according to the flag.
- Simplified transcodeAndAdd.
- Reordered methods of deltaEncodedChunk and doubleDeltaEncoded chunk
to match the order in the chunk interface.
- Only transcode if the chunk is not yet half full. If more than half
full, add a new chunk instead.
In that commit, the 'maintainSeries' call was accidentally removed.
This commit refactors things a bit so that there is now a clean
'maintainMemorySeries' and a 'maintainArchivedSeries' call.
Straighten the nomenclature a bit (consistently use 'drop' for
chunks and 'purge' for series/metrics).
Remove the annoying 'Completed maintenance sweep through archived
fingerprints' message if there were no archived fingerprints to do
maintenance on.
This is done by bucketing chunks by fingerprint. If the persisting to
disk falls behind, more and more chunks are in the queue. As soon as
there are "double hits", we will now persist both chunks in one go,
doubling the disk throughput (assuming it is limited by disk
seeks). Should even more pile up so that we end wit "triple hits", we
will persist those first, and so on.
Even if we have millions of time series, this will still help,
assuming not all of them are growing with the same speed. Series that
get many samples and/or are not very compressable will accumulate
chunks faster, and they will soon get double- or triple-writes.
To improve the chance of double writes,
-storage.local.persistence-queue-capacity could be set to a higher
value. However, that will slow down shutdown a lot (as the queue has
to be worked through). So we leave it to the user to set it to a
really high value. A more fundamental solution would be to checkpoint
not only head chunks, but also chunks still in the persist queue. That
would be quite complicated for a rather limited use-case (running many
time series with high ingestion rate on slow spinning disks).
Starting a goroutine takes 1-2µs on my laptop. From the "numbers every
Go programmer should know", I had 300ns for a channel send in my
mind. Turns out, on my laptop, it takes only 60ns. That's fast enough
to warrant the machinery of yet another channel with a fixed set of
worker goroutines feeding from it. The number chosen (8 for now) is
low enough to not really afflict a measurable overhead (a big
Prometheus server has >1000 goroutines running), but high enough to
not make sample ingestion a bottleneck.
persistence.go is way too long anyway, and a lot of code is just crash
recovery, which is not important to understand the normal operation.
Also, remove unused `exists` function.
