So far we've been using Go's native time.Time for anything related to sample
timestamps. Since the range of time.Time is much bigger than what we need, this
has created two problems:
- there could be time.Time values which were out of the range/precision of the
time type that we persist to disk, therefore causing incorrectly ordered keys.
One bug caused by this was:
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/367
It would be good to use a timestamp type that's more closely aligned with
what the underlying storage supports.
- sizeof(time.Time) is 192, while Prometheus should be ok with a single 64-bit
Unix timestamp (possibly even a 32-bit one). Since we store samples in large
numbers, this seriously affects memory usage. Furthermore, copying/working
with the data will be faster if it's smaller.
*MEMORY USAGE RESULTS*
Initial memory usage comparisons for a running Prometheus with 1 timeseries and
100,000 samples show roughly a 13% decrease in total (VIRT) memory usage. In my
tests, this advantage for some reason decreased a bit the more samples the
timeseries had (to 5-7% for millions of samples). This I can't fully explain,
but perhaps garbage collection issues were involved.
*WHEN TO USE THE NEW TIMESTAMP TYPE*
The new clientmodel.Timestamp type should be used whenever time
calculations are either directly or indirectly related to sample
timestamps.
For example:
- the timestamp of a sample itself
- all kinds of watermarks
- anything that may become or is compared to a sample timestamp (like the timestamp
passed into Target.Scrape()).
When to still use time.Time:
- for measuring durations/times not related to sample timestamps, like duration
telemetry exporting, timers that indicate how frequently to execute some
action, etc.
*NOTE ON OPERATOR OPTIMIZATION TESTS*
We don't use operator optimization code anymore, but it still lives in
the code as dead code. It still has tests, but I couldn't get all of them to
pass with the new timestamp format. I commented out the failing cases for now,
but we should probably remove the dead code soon. I just didn't want to do that
in the same change as this.
Change-Id: I821787414b0debe85c9fffaeb57abd453727af0f
This adds timers around several query-relevant code blocks. For now, the
query timer stats are only logged for queries initiated through the UI.
In other cases (rule evaluations), the stats are simply thrown away.
My hope is that this helps us understand where queries spend time,
especially in cases where they sometimes hang for unusual amounts of
time.
This commit introduces to Prometheus a batch database sample curator,
which corroborates the high watermarks for sample series against the
curation watermark table to see whether a curator of a given type
needs to be run.
The curator is an abstract executor, which runs various curation
strategies across the database. It remarks the progress for each
type of curation processor that runs for a given sample series.
A curation procesor is responsible for effectuating the underlying
batch changes that are request. In this commit, we introduce the
CompactionProcessor, which takes several bits of runtime metadata and
combine sparse sample entries in the database together to form larger
groups. For instance, for a given series it would be possible to
have the curator effectuate the following grouping:
- Samples Older than Two Weeks: Grouped into Bunches of 10000
- Samples Older than One Week: Grouped into Bunches of 1000
- Samples Older than One Day: Grouped into Bunches of 100
- Samples Older than One Hour: Grouped into Bunches of 10
The benefits hereof of such a compaction are 1. a smaller search
space in the database keyspace, 2. better employment of compression
for repetious values, and 3. reduced seek times.
