## Problem
Followup to https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/6776
While #6776 makes compaction safe on sharded tenants, the logic for
keyspace partitioning remains inefficient: it assumes that the size of
data on a pageserver can be calculated simply as the range between start
and end of a Range -- this is not the case in sharded tenants, where
data within a range belongs to a variety of shards.
Closes: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/6774
## Summary of changes
I experimented with using a sharding-aware range type in KeySpace to
replace all the Range<Key> uses, but the impact on other code was quite
large (many places use the ranges), and not all of them need this
property of being able to approximate the physical size of data within a
key range.
So I compromised on expressing this as a ShardedRange type, but only
using that type selctively: during keyspace repartition, and in tiered
compaction when accumulating key ranges.
- keyspace partitioning methods take sharding parameters as an input
- new `ShardedRange` type wraps a Range<Key> and a shard identity
- ShardedRange::page_count is the shard-aware replacement for
key_range_size
- Callers that don't need to be shard-aware (e.g. vectored get code that
just wants to count the number of keys in a keyspace) can use
ShardedRange::raw_size to get the faster, shard-naive code (same as old
`key_range_size`)
- Compaction code is updated to carry a shard identity so that it can
use shard aware calculations
- Unit tests for the new fragmentation logic.
- Add a test for compaction on sharded tenants, that validates that we
generate appropriately sized image layers (this fails before fixing
keyspace partitioning)
previously in https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7375, we
observed that for in-memory layers, we will need to iterate every key in
the key space in order to get the result. The operation can be more
efficient if we use BTreeMap as the in-memory layer representation, even
if we are doing vectored get in a dense keyspace. Imagine a case that
the in-memory layer covers a very little part of the keyspace, and most
of the keys need to be found in lower layers. Using a BTreeMap can
significantly reduce probes for nonexistent keys.
## Summary of changes
* Use BTreeMap as in-memory layer representation.
* Optimize the vectored get flow to utilize the range scan functionality
of BTreeMap.
Signed-off-by: Alex Chi Z <chi@neon.tech>
## Problem
Sequential get runs after vectored get, so it is possible for the later
to time out while waiting for its ancestor's Lsn to become ready and for
the former to succeed (it essentially has a doubled wait time).
## Summary of Changes
Relax the validation to allow for such rare cases.
## Problem
Sometimes we have test data in the form of S3 contents that we would
like to run live in a neon_local environment.
## Summary of changes
- Add a storage controller API that imports an existing tenant.
Currently this is equivalent to doing a create with a high generation
number, but in future this would be something smarter to probe S3 to
find the shards in a tenant and find generation numbers.
- Add a `neon_local` command that invokes the import API, and then
inspects timelines in the newly attached tenant to create matching
branches.
extracted from https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7468, part of
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7462.
In the page server, we use i128 (instead of u128) to do the integer
representation of the key, which indicates that the highest bit of the
key should not be 1. This constraints our keyspace to <= 0x7F.
Also fix the bug of `to_i128` that dropped the highest 4b. Now we keep
3b of them, dropping the sign bit.
And on that, we shrink the metadata keyspace to 0x60-0x7F for now, and
once we add support for u128, we can have a larger metadata keyspace.
---------
Signed-off-by: Alex Chi Z <chi@neon.tech>
Changing metadata format is not easy. This pull request adds a
tenant-level flag on whether to enable aux file v2. As long as we don't
roll this out to the user and guarantee our staging projects can persist
tenant config correctly, we can test the aux file v2 change with setting
this flag. Previous discussion at
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7424.
Signed-off-by: Alex Chi Z <chi@neon.tech>
Implements an approach different from the one #7488 chose: We now return
`past` instead of `present` (or`future`) when encountering the edge case
where commit_lsn < min_lsn. In my opinion, both `past` and `present` are
correct responses, but past is slightly better as the lsn returned by
`present` with #7488 is one too "new". In practice, this shouldn't
matter much, but shrug.
We agreed in slack that this is the better approach:
https://neondb.slack.com/archives/C03F5SM1N02/p1713871064147029
## Problem
PR #7230 attempted to introduce a WAL ingest threshold for checking
whether enough deltas are stacked to warrant creating a new image layer.
However, this check was incorrectly performed at the compaction
partition level instead of the timeline level. Hence, it inhibited GC
for any keys outside of the first partition.
## Summary of Changes
Hoist the check up to the timeline level.
part of https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7124
# Problem
(Re-stating the problem from #7124 for posterity)
The `test_bulk_ingest` benchmark shows about 2x lower throughput with
`tokio-epoll-uring` compared to `std-fs`.
That's why we temporarily disabled it in #7238.
The reason for this regression is that the benchmark runs on a system
without memory pressure and thus std-fs writes don't block on disk IO
but only copy the data into the kernel page cache.
`tokio-epoll-uring` cannot beat that at this time, and possibly never.
(However, under memory pressure, std-fs would stall the executor thread
on kernel page cache writeback disk IO. That's why we want to use
`tokio-epoll-uring`. And we likely want to use O_DIRECT in the future,
at which point std-fs becomes an absolute show-stopper.)
More elaborate analysis:
https://neondatabase.notion.site/Why-test_bulk_ingest-is-slower-with-tokio-epoll-uring-918c5e619df045a7bd7b5f806cfbd53f?pvs=4
# Changes
This PR increases the buffer size of `blob_io` and `EphemeralFile` from
PAGE_SZ=8k to 64k.
Longer-term, we probably want to do double-buffering / pipelined IO.
# Resource Usage
We currently do not flush the buffer when freezing the InMemoryLayer.
That means a single Timeline can have multiple 64k buffers alive, esp if
flushing is slow.
This poses an OOM risk.
We should either bound the number of frozen layers
(https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7317).
Or we should change the freezing code to flush the buffer and drop the
allocation.
However, that's future work.
# Performance
(Measurements done on i3en.3xlarge.)
The `test_bulk_insert.py` is too noisy, even with instance storage. It
varies by 30-40%. I suspect that's due to compaction. Raising amount of
data by 10x doesn't help with the noisiness.)
So, I used the `bench_ingest` from @jcsp 's #7409 .
Specifically, the `ingest-small-values/ingest 128MB/100b seq` and
`ingest-small-values/ingest 128MB/100b seq, no delta` benchmarks.
| | | seq | seq, no delta |
|-----|-------------------|-----|---------------|
| 8k | std-fs | 55 | 165 |
| 8k | tokio-epoll-uring | 37 | 107 |
| 64k | std-fs | 55 | 180 |
| 64k | tokio-epoll-uring | 48 | 164 |
The `8k` is from before this PR, the `64k` is with this PR.
The values are the throughput reported by the benchmark (MiB/s).
We see that this PR gets `tokio-epoll-uring` from 67% to 87% of `std-fs`
performance in the `seq` benchmark. Notably, `seq` appears to hit some
other bottleneck at `55 MiB/s`. CC'ing #7418 due to the apparent
bottlenecks in writing delta layers.
For `seq, no delta`, this PR gets `tokio-epoll-uring` from 64% to 91% of
`std-fs` performance.
part of https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7124
Changes
-------
This PR replaces the `EphemeralFile::write_blob`-specifc `struct Writer`
with re-use of `owned_buffers_io::write::BufferedWriter`.
Further, it restructures the code to cleanly separate
* the high-level aspect of EphemeralFile's write_blob / read_blk API
* the page-caching aspect
* the aspect of IO
* performing buffered write IO to an underlying VirtualFile
* serving reads from either the VirtualFile or the buffer if it hasn't
been flushed yet
* the annoying "feature" that reads past the end of the written range
are allowed and expected to return zeroed memory, as long as one remains
within one PAGE_SZ
In the old protocol version, the client sent with each request:
- latest: bool. If true, the client requested the latest page
version, and the 'lsn' was just a hint of when the page was last
modified
- lsn: Lsn, the page version to return
This protocol didn't allow requesting a page at a particular
non-latest LSN and *also* sending a hint on when the page was last
modified. That put a read only compute into an awkward position where
it had to either request each page at the replay-LSN, which could be
very close to the last LSN written in the primary and therefore
require the pageserver to wait for it to arrive, or an older LSN which
could already be garbage collected in the pageserver, resulting in an
error. The new protocol version fixes that by allowing a read only
compute to send both LSNs.
To use the new protocol version, use "pagestream_v2" command instead
of just "pagestream". The old protocol version is still supported, for
compatibility with old computes (and in fact there is no client
support yet, it is added by the next commit).
The 'latest' argument was passed to the functions in
pgdatadir_mapping.rs to know when they can update the relsize
cache. Commit e69ff3fc00 changed how the relsize cache is updated,
making the 'latest' argument unused.
## Problem
We are currently supporting two read paths. No bueno.
## Summary of changes
High level: use vectored read path to serve get page requests - gated by
`get_impl` config
Low level:
1. Add ps config, `get_impl` to specify which read path to use when
serving get page requests
2. Fix base cached image handling for the vectored read path. This was
subtly broken: previously we
would not mark keys that went past their cached lsn as complete. This is
a self standing change which
could be its own PR, but I've included it here because writing separate
tests for it is tricky.
3. Fork get page to use either the legacy or vectored implementation
4. Validate the use of vectored read path when serving get page requests
against the legacy implementation.
Controlled by `validate_vectored_get` ps config.
5. Use the vectored read path to serve get page requests in tests (with
validation).
## Note
Since the vectored read path does not go through the page cache to read
buffers, this change also amounts to a removal of the buffer page cache. Materialized page cache
is still used.
Currently we move data to the intended storage class via lifecycle
rules, but those are a daily batch job so data first spends up to a day
in standard storage.
Therefore, make it possible to specify the storage class used for
uploads to S3 so that the data doesn't have to be migrated
automatically.
The advantage of this is that it gives cleaner billing reports.
Part of https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/11348
## Problem
If the previous step of the vectored left no further keyspace to
investigate (i.e. keyspace remains empty after removing keys completed in the previous step),
then we'd still grab the layers lock, potentially add an in-mem layer to the fringe
and at some further point read its index without reading any values from it.
## Summary of changes
If there's nothing left in the current keyspace, then skip the search
and just select the next item from the fringe as usual.
When running `test_pg_regress[release-pg16]` with the vectored read path
for singular gets this improved perf drastically (see PR cover letter).
## Correctness
Since no keys remained from the previous range (i.e. we are on a leaf
node) there's nothing that search can find in deeper nodes.
## Problem
Vectored and non-vectored read paths don't publish the same set of
metrics. Metrics parity is needed for coalescing the read paths.
## Summary of changes
* Publish reconstruct time and fetching data for reconstruct time from
the vectored read path
* Remove pageserver_getpage_reconstruct_seconds{res="err"} - wasn't used
anyway
As seen with a recent incident, eviction tasks can cause pageserver-wide
permit starvation on the background task semaphore when synthetic size
calculation takes a long time for a tenant that has more than our permit
number of timelines or multiple tenants that have slow synthetic size
and total number of timelines exceeds the permits. Metric links can be
found in the internal [slack thread].
As a solution, release the permit while waiting for the state guarding
the synthetic size calculation. This will most likely hurt the eviction
task eviction performance, but that does not matter because we are
hoping to get away from it using OnlyImitiate policy anyway and rely
solely on disk usage-based eviction.
[slack thread]:
https://neondb.slack.com/archives/C06UEMLK7FE/p1713810505587809?thread_ts=1713468604.508969&cid=C06UEMLK7FE
There was an edge case where
`get_lsn_by_timestamp`/`find_lsn_for_timestamp` could have returned an
lsn that is before the limits we enforce: when we did find SLRU entries
with timestamps before the one we search for.
The API contract of `get_lsn_by_timestamp` is to not return something
before the anchestor lsn.
cc https://neondb.slack.com/archives/C03F5SM1N02/p1713871064147029
## Problem
We already made a change in #6407 to make pitr_interval authoritative
for synthetic size calculations (do not charge users for data retained
due to gc_horizon), but that change didn't cover the case where someone
entirely disables time-based retention by setting pitr_interval=0
Relates to: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/6374
## Summary of changes
When pitr_interval is zero, do not set `pitr_cutoff` based on
gc_horizon.
gc_horizon is still enforced, but separately (its value is passed
separately, there was never a need to claim pitr_cutoff to gc_horizon)
## More detail
### Issue 1
Before this PR, we would skip the update_gc_info for timelines with
last_record_lsn() < gc_horizon.
Let's call such timelines "tiny".
The rationale for that presumably was that we can't GC anything in the
tiny timelines, why bother to call update_gc_info().
However, synthetic size calculation relies on up-to-date
update_gc_info() data.
Before this PR, tiny timelines would never get an updated
GcInfo::pitr_horizon (it remained Lsn(0)).
Even on projects with pitr_interval=0d.
With this PR, update_gc_info is always called, hence
GcInfo::pitr_horizon is always updated, thereby
providing synthetic size calculation with up-to-data data.
### Issue 2
Before this PR, regardless of whether the timeline is "tiny" or not,
GcInfo::pitr_horizon was clamped to at least last_record_lsn -
gc_horizon, even if the pitr window in terms of LSN range was shorter
(=less than) the gc_horizon.
With this PR, that clamping is removed, so, for pitr_interval=0, the
pitr_horizon = last_record_lsn.
## Problem
Split off from https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7399, which is
the first piece of code that does a WithDelimiter object listing using a
prefix that isn't a full directory name.
## Summary of changes
- Revise list function to not append a `/` to the prefix -- prefixes
don't have to end with a slash.
- Fix local_fs implementation of list to not assume that WithDelimiter
case will always use a directory as a prerfix.
- Remove `list_files`, `list_prefixes` wrappers, as they add little
value and obscure the underlying list function -- we need callers to
understand the semantics of what they're really calling (listobjectsv2)
Extracted from https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7375. We assume
everything >= 0x80 are metadata keys. AUX file keys are part of the
metadata keys, and we use `0x90` as the prefix for AUX file keys.
The AUX file encoding is described in the code comment. We use xxhash128
as the hash algorithm. It seems to be portable according to the
introduction,
> xxHash is an Extremely fast Hash algorithm, processing at RAM speed
limits. Code is highly portable, and produces hashes identical across
all platforms (little / big endian).
...though whether the Rust version follows the same convention is
unknown and might need manual review of the library. Anyways, we can
always change the hash algorithm before rolling it out in
staging/end-user, and I made a quick decision to use xxhash here because
it generates 128b hash + portable. We can save the discussion of which
hash algorithm to use later.
---------
Signed-off-by: Alex Chi Z <chi@neon.tech>
## Problem
We recently went through an incident where compaction was inhibited by a
bug. We didn't observe this until quite late because we did not have alerting
on deep reads.
## Summary of changes
+ Tweak an existing metric that tracks the depth of a read on the
non-vectored read path:
* Give it a better name
* Track all layers
* Larger buckets
+ Add a similar metric for the vectored read path
+ Add a compaction smoke test which uses these metrics. This test would
have caught
the compaction issue mentioned earlier.
Related https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7428
## Problem
Vectored get would descend into ancestor timelines for aux files.
This is not the behaviour of the legacy read path and blocks cutting
over to the vectored read path.
Fixes https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/7379
## Summary of Changes
Treat non inherited keys specially in vectored get. At the point when
we want to descend into the ancestor mark all pending non inherited keys
as errored out at the key level. Note that this diverges from the
standard vectored get behaviour for missing keys which is a top level
error. This divergence is required to avoid blocking compaction in case
such an error is encountered when compaction aux files keys. I'm pretty
sure the bug I just described predates the vectored get implementation,
but it's still worth fixing.
## Problem
The `export_import_between_pageservers` script us to do major storage format changes
in the past. If we have to do such breaking changes in the future this approach
wouldn't be suitable because:
1. It doesn't scale to the current size of the fleet
2. It loses history
## Summary of changes
Remove the script and its associated test.
Keep `fullbasebackup` and friends because it's useful for debugging.
Closes https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/11648
Instead of trusting that a request with latest == true means that the
request LSN was at least last_record_lsn, remember explicitly when the
relation cache was initialized.
Incidentally, this allows updating the relation size cache also on reads
from read-only endpoints, when the endpoint is at a relatively recent
LSN (more recent than the end of the timeline when the timeline was
loaded in the pageserver).
Add a comment to wait_or_get_last_lsn() that it might be better to use
an older LSN when possible. Note that doing that would be unsafe,
without the relation cache changes in this commit!
As part of https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/7375 and to improve
the current vectored get implementation, we separate the missing key
error out. This also saves us several Box allocations in the get page
implementation.
## Summary of changes
* Create a caching field of layer traversal id for each of the layer.
* Remove box allocations for layer traversal id retrieval and implement
MissingKey error message as before. This should be a little bit faster.
* Do not format error message until `Display`.
* For in-mem layer, the descriptor is different before/after frozen. I'm
using once lock for that.
---------
Signed-off-by: Alex Chi Z <chi@neon.tech>
## Problem
- #7451
INIT_FORKNUM blocks must be stored on shard 0 to enable including them
in basebackup.
This issue can be missed in simple tests because creating an unlogged
table isn't sufficient -- to repro I had to create an _index_ on an
unlogged table (then restart the endpoint).
Closes: #7451
## Summary of changes
- Add a reproducer for the issue.
- Tweak the condition for `key_is_shard0` to include anything that isn't
a normal relation block _and_ any normal relation block whose forknum is
INIT_FORKNUM.
- To enable existing databases to recover from the issue, add a special
case that omits relations if they were stored on the wrong INITFORK.
This enables postgres to start and the user to drop the table and
recreate it.
Before, we asserted that a layer would only be loaded by the timeline
that initially created it. Now, with the ancestor detach, we will want
to utilize remote copy as much as possible, so we will need to open
other timeline layers as our own.
Cc: #6994
Currently, any `Timeline::schedule_uploads` will generate a fresh
`TimelineMetadata` instead of updating the values, which it means to
update. This makes it impossible for #6994 to work while `Timeline`
receives layer flushes by overwriting any configured new
`ancestor_timeline_id` and possible `ancestor_lsn`.
The solution is to only make full `TimelineMetadata` "updates" from one
place: branching. At runtime, update only the three fields, same as
before in `Timeline::schedule_updates`.
## Problem
Vectored read path may return an image that's newer than the request lsn
under certain circumstances.
```
LSN
^
|
|
500 | ------------------------- -> branch point
400 | X
300 | X
200 | ------------------------------------> requested lsn
100 | X
|---------------------------------> Key
Legend:
* X - page images
```
The vectored read path inspects each ancestor timeline one by one
starting from the current one.
When moving into the ancestor timeline, the current code resets the
current search lsn (called `cont_lsn` in code)
to the lsn of the ancestor timeline
([here](d5708e7435/pageserver/src/tenant/timeline.rs (L2971))).
For instance, if the request lsn was 200, we would:
1. Look into the current timeline and find nothing for the key
2. Descend into the ancestor timeline and set `cont_lsn=500`
3. Return the page image at LSN 400
Myself and Christian find it very unlikely for this to have happened in
prod since the vectored read path
is always used at the last record lsn.
This issue was found by a regress test during the work to migrate get
page handling to use the vectored
implementation. I've applied my fix to that wip branch and it fixed the
issue.
## Summary of changes
The fix is to set the current search lsn to the min between the
requested LSN and the ancestor lsn.
Hence, at step 2 above we would set the current search lsn to 200 and
ignore the images above that.
A test illustrating the bug is also included. Fails without the patch
and passes with it.
#7030 introduced an annoying papercut, deeming a failure to acquire a
strong reference to `LayerInner` from `DownloadedLayer::drop` as a
canceled eviction. Most of the time, it wasn't that, but just timeline
deletion or tenant detach with the layer not wanting to be deleted or
evicted.
When a Layer is dropped as part of a normal shutdown, the `Layer` is
dropped first, and the `DownloadedLayer` the second. Because of this, we
cannot detect eviction being canceled from the `DownloadedLayer::drop`.
We can detect it from `LayerInner::drop`, which this PR adds.
Test case is added which before had 1 started eviction, 2 canceled. Now
it accurately finds 1 started, 1 canceled.
## Problem
Some tenants were observed to stop doing downloads after some time
## Summary of changes
- Fix a rogue `<` that was incorrectly scheduling work when `now` was
_before_ the scheduling target, rather than after. This usually resulted
in too-frequent execution, but could also result in never executing, if
the current time has advanced ahead of `next_download` at the time we
call `schedule()`.
- Fix in-memory list of timelines not being amended after timeline
deletion: the resulted in repeated harmless logs about the timeline
being removed, and redundant calls to remove_dir_all for the timeline
path.
- Add a log at startup to make it easier to see a particular tenant
starting in secondary mode (this is for parity with the logging that
exists when spawning an attached tenant). Previously searching on tenant
ID didn't provide a clear signal as to how the tenant was started during
pageserver start.
- Add a test that exercises secondary downloads using the background
scheduling, whereas existing tests were using the API hook to invoke
download directly.
For "timeline ancestor merge" or "timeline detach," we need to "cut"
delta layers at particular LSN. The name "truncate" is not used as it
would imply that a layer file changes, instead of what happens: we copy
keys with Lsn less than a "cut point".
Cc: #6994
Add the "copy delta layer prefix" operation to DeltaLayerInner, re-using
some of the vectored read internals. The code is `cfg(test)` until it
will be used later with a more complete integration test.
## Problem
This trace is emitted whenever a vectored read touches the end of a
delta layer file. It's a perfectly normal case, but I expected it to be
more rare when implementing the code.
## Summary of changes
Demote log to debug.
## Problem
We specify a bunch of possible error codes in the pageserver api swagger
spec. This is error prone and annoying to work with.
https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/pull/11907 introduced generic
error handling on the control plane side, so we can now clean up the
spec.
## Summary of changes
* Remove generic error codes from swagger spec
* Update a couple route handlers which would previously return an error
without a `msg` field in the response body.
Tested via https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/pull/12340
Related https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/7238
## Problem
test_sharding_smoke recently got an added section that checks deletion
of a sharded tenant. The storage controller does a retry loop for
deletion, waiting for a 404 response. When deletion is a bit slow (debug
builds), the retry of deletion was getting a 500 response -- this caused
the test to become flaky (example failure:
https://neon-github-public-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/reports/release-proxy/8659801445/index.html#testresult/b4cbf5b58190f60e/retries)
There was a false comment in the code:
```
match tenant.current_state() {
TenantState::Broken { .. } | TenantState::Stopping { .. } => {
- // If a tenant is broken or stopping, DeleteTenantFlow can
- // handle it: broken tenants proceed to delete, stopping tenants
- // are checked for deletion already in progress.
```
If the tenant is stopping, DeleteTenantFlow does not in fact handle it,
but returns a 500-yielding errror.
## Summary of changes
Before calling into DeleteTenantFlow, if the tenant is in
stopping|broken state then return 202 if a deletion is in progress. This
makes the API friendlier for retries.
The historic AlreadyInProgress (409) response still exists for if we
enter DeleteTenantFlow and unexpectedly see the tenant stopping. That
should go away when we implement #5080 . For the moment, callers that
handle 409s should continue to do so.
Before this PR, the `nix::poll::poll` call would stall the executor.
This PR refactors the `walredo::process` module to allow for different
implementations, and adds a new `async` implementation which uses
`tokio::process::ChildStd{in,out}` for IPC.
The `sync` variant remains the default for now; we'll do more testing in
staging and gradual rollout to prod using the config variable.
Performance
-----------
I updated `bench_walredo.rs`, demonstrating that a single `async`-based
walredo manager used by N=1...128 tokio tasks has lower latency and
higher throughput.
I further did manual less-micro-benchmarking in the real pageserver
binary.
Methodology & results are published here:
https://neondatabase.notion.site/2024-04-08-async-walredo-benchmarking-8c0ed3cc8d364a44937c4cb50b6d7019?pvs=4
tl;dr:
- use pagebench against a pageserver patched to answer getpage request &
small-enough working set to fit into PS PageCache / kernel page cache.
- compare knee in the latency/throughput curve
- N tenants, each 1 pagebench clients
- sync better throughput at N < 30, async better at higher N
- async generally noticable but not much worse p99.X tail latencies
- eyeballing CPU efficiency in htop, `async` seems significantly more
CPU efficient at ca N=[0.5*ncpus, 1.5*ncpus], worse than `sync` outside
of that band
Mental Model For Walredo & Scheduler Interactions
-------------------------------------------------
Walredo is CPU-/DRAM-only work.
This means that as soon as the Pageserver writes to the pipe, the
walredo process becomes runnable.
To the Linux kernel scheduler, the `$ncpus` executor threads and the
walredo process thread are just `struct task_struct`, and it will divide
CPU time fairly among them.
In `sync` mode, there are always `$ncpus` runnable `struct task_struct`
because the executor thread blocks while `walredo` runs, and the
executor thread becomes runnable when the `walredo` process is done
handling the request.
In `async` mode, the executor threads remain runnable unless there are
no more runnable tokio tasks, which is unlikely in a production
pageserver.
The above means that in `sync` mode, there is an implicit concurrency
limit on concurrent walredo requests (`$num_runtimes *
$num_executor_threads_per_runtime`).
And executor threads do not compete in the Linux kernel scheduler for
CPU time, due to the blocked-runnable-ping-pong.
In `async` mode, there is no concurrency limit, and the walredo tasks
compete with the executor threads for CPU time in the kernel scheduler.
If we're not CPU-bound, `async` has a pipelining and hence throughput
advantage over `sync` because one executor thread can continue
processing requests while a walredo request is in flight.
If we're CPU-bound, under a fair CPU scheduler, the *fixed* number of
executor threads has to share CPU time with the aggregate of walredo
processes.
It's trivial to reason about this in `sync` mode due to the
blocked-runnable-ping-pong.
In `async` mode, at 100% CPU, the system arrives at some (potentially
sub-optiomal) equilibrium where the executor threads get just enough CPU
time to fill up the remaining CPU time with runnable walredo process.
Why `async` mode Doesn't Limit Walredo Concurrency
--------------------------------------------------
To control that equilibrium in `async` mode, one may add a tokio
semaphore to limit the number of in-flight walredo requests.
However, the placement of such a semaphore is non-trivial because it
means that tasks queuing up behind it hold on to their request-scoped
allocations.
In the case of walredo, that might be the entire reconstruct data.
We don't limit the number of total inflight Timeline::get (we only
throttle admission).
So, that queue might lead to an OOM.
The alternative is to acquire the semaphore permit *before* collecting
reconstruct data.
However, what if we need to on-demand download?
A combination of semaphores might help: one for reconstruct data, one
for walredo.
The reconstruct data semaphore permit is dropped after acquiring the
walredo semaphore permit.
This scheme effectively enables both a limit on in-flight reconstruct
data and walredo concurrency.
However, sizing the amount of permits for the semaphores is tricky:
- Reconstruct data retrieval is a mix of disk IO and CPU work.
- If we need to do on-demand downloads, it's network IO + disk IO + CPU
work.
- At this time, we have no good data on how the wall clock time is
distributed.
It turns out that, in my benchmarking, the system worked fine without a
semaphore. So, we're shipping async walredo without one for now.
Future Work
-----------
We will do more testing of `async` mode and gradual rollout to prod
using the config flag.
Once that is done, we'll remove `sync` mode to avoid the temporary code
duplication introduced by this PR.
The flag will be removed.
The `wait()` for the child process to exit is still synchronous; the
comment [here](
655d3b6468/pageserver/src/walredo.rs (L294-L306))
is still a valid argument in favor of that.
The `sync` mode had another implicit advantage: from tokio's
perspective, the calling task was using up coop budget.
But with `async` mode, that's no longer the case -- to tokio, the writes
to the child process pipe look like IO.
We could/should inform tokio about the CPU time budget consumed by the
task to achieve fairness similar to `sync`.
However, the [runtime function for this is
`tokio_unstable`](`https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/task/fn.consume_budget.html).
Refs
----
refs #6628
refs https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/2975
No functional changes, this is a comments/naming PR.
While merging sharding changes, some cleanup of the shard.rs types was
deferred.
In this PR:
- Rename `is_zero` to `is_shard_zero` to make clear that this method
doesn't literally mean that the entire object is zeros, just that it
refers to the 0th shard in a tenant.
- Pull definitions of types to the top of shard.rs and add a big comment
giving an overview of which type is for what.
Closes: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/6072
Adds another tool to the DR toolbox: ability in pagectl to
recover arbitrary prefixes in remote storage. Requires remote storage config,
the prefix, and the travel-to timestamp parameter
to be specified as cli args.
The done-if-after parameter is also supported.
Example invocation (after `aws login --profile dev`):
```
RUST_LOG=remote_storage=debug AWS_PROFILE=dev cargo run -p pagectl time-travel-remote-prefix 'remote_storage = { bucket_name = "neon-test-bucket-name", bucket_region = "us-east-2" }' wal/3aa8fcc61f6d357410b7de754b1d9001/641e5342083b2235ee3deb8066819683/ 2024-04-05T17:00:00Z
```
This has been written to resolve a customer recovery case:
https://neondb.slack.com/archives/C033RQ5SPDH/p1712256888468009
There is validation of the prefix to prevent accidentially specifying
too generic prefixes, which can cause corruption and data
loss if used wrongly. Still, the validation is not perfect and it is
important that the command is used with caution.
If possible, `time_travel_remote_storage` should
be used instead which has additional checks in place.
Problem
Currently, we base our time based layer rolling decision on the last
time we froze a layer. This means that if we roll a layer and then go
idle for longer than the checkpoint timeout the next layer will be
rolled after the first write. This is of course not desirable.
Summary of changes
Record the timepoint of the first write to an open layer and use that
for time based layer rolling decisions. Note that I had to keep
`Timeline::last_freeze_ts` for the sharded tenant disk consistent lsn
skip hack.
Fixes#7241
## Problem
We have two places that use a helper (`ser_rfc3339_millis`) to get serde
to stringify SystemTimes into the desired format.
## Summary of changes
Created a new module `utils::serde_system_time` and inside it a wrapper
type `SystemTime` for `std::time::SystemTime` that
serializes/deserializes to the RFC3339 format.
This new type is then used in the two places that were previously using
the helper for serialization, thereby eliminating the need to decorate
structs.
Closes#7151.
This PR is an off-by-default revision v2 of the (since-reverted) PR
#6555 / commit `3220f830b7fbb785d6db8a93775f46314f10a99b`.
See that PR for details on why running with a single runtime is
desirable and why we should be ready.
We reverted #6555 because it showed regressions in prodlike cloudbench,
see the revert commit message `ad072de4209193fd21314cf7f03f14df4fa55eb1`
for more context.
This PR makes it an opt-in choice via an env var.
The default is to use the 4 separate runtimes that we have today, there
shouldn't be any performance change.
I tested manually that the env var & added metric works.
```
# undefined env var => no change to before this PR, uses 4 runtimes
./target/debug/neon_local start
# defining the env var enables one-runtime mode, value defines that one runtime's configuration
NEON_PAGESERVER_USE_ONE_RUNTIME=current_thread ./target/debug/neon_local start
NEON_PAGESERVER_USE_ONE_RUNTIME=multi_thread:1 ./target/debug/neon_local start
NEON_PAGESERVER_USE_ONE_RUNTIME=multi_thread:2 ./target/debug/neon_local start
NEON_PAGESERVER_USE_ONE_RUNTIME=multi_thread:default ./target/debug/neon_local start
```
I want to use this change to do more manualy testing and potentially
testing in staging.
Future Work
-----------
Testing / deployment ergonomics would be better if this were a variable
in `pageserver.toml`.
It can be done, but, I don't need it right now, so let's stick with the
env var.
