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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 |
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time_test.go |