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.
This has the advantage that the user doesn't need
to list all labels they want to keep (as with "by")
but without having to worry about inconsistent labels
as when there's only one time series (as with "keeping_common").
Almost all aggregation should use this rather than the existing
two options as it's much less error prone and easier to maintain
due to not having to always add in "job" plus whatever other common
job-level labels you have like "region".
When doing comparison operations on vectors, filtering
sometimes gets in the way and you have to go to a fair bit of
effort to workaround it in order to always return a result.
The 'bool' modifier instead of filtering returns 0/1 depending
on the result of the compairson.
This is also a prerequisite to removing plain scalar/scalar comparisons,
as it maintains the current behaviour under a new syntax.
The current behaviour produces values that are not
from rules or scrapes. So if for example I have
a boolean 0/1 it can be returned as 0.2344589. This
prevents a number of advanced use cases, introduces
race conditions and can produce misleading graphs.
This commit removes the possibility to have multi-statement queries
which had no full support anyway. This makes the caller responsible
for multi-statement semantics.
Multiple tests are no longer timing-dependent.
These changes allow to do range queries over scalar expressions.
Errors on bad types for range queries are now raised on query creation
rather than evaluation.
A high number of concurrent queries can slow each other down
so that none of them is reasonbly responsive. This commit limits
the number of queries being concurrently executed.
This copies the evaluation logic from the current rules/ package.
The new engine handles the execution process from query string to final result.
It provides query timeout and cancellation and general flexibility for
future changes.
functions.go: Add evaluation implementation. Slight changes to in/out data but
not to the processing logic.
quantile.go: No changes.
analyzer.go: No changes.
engine.go: Actually new part. Mainly consists of evaluation methods
which were not changed.
setup_test.go: Copy of rules/helpers_test.go to setup test storage.
promql_test.go: Copy of rules/rules_test.go.
