aa4ec11af9
# Problem
The timeout-based batching adds latency to unbatchable workloads.
We can choose a short batching timeout (e.g. 10us) but that requires
high-resolution timers, which tokio doesn't have.
I thoroughly explored options to use OS timers (see
[this](https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/9822) abandoned PR).
In short, it's not an attractive option because any timer implementation
adds non-trivial overheads.
# Solution
The insight is that, in the steady state of a batchable workload, the
time we spend in `get_vectored` will be hundreds of microseconds anyway.
If we prepare the next batch concurrently to `get_vectored`, we will
have a sizeable batch ready once `get_vectored` of the current batch is
done and do not need an explicit timeout.
This can be reasonably described as **pipelining of the protocol
handler**.
# Implementation
We model the sub-protocol handler for pagestream requests
(`handle_pagrequests`) as two futures that form a pipeline:
2. Batching: read requests from the connection and fill the current
batch
3. Execution: `take` the current batch, execute it using `get_vectored`,
and send the response.
The Reading and Batching stage are connected through a new type of
channel called `spsc_fold`.
See the long comment in the `handle_pagerequests_pipelined` for details.
# Changes
- Refactor `handle_pagerequests`
- separate functions for
- reading one protocol message; produces a `BatchedFeMessage` with just
one page request in it
- batching; tried to merge an incoming `BatchedFeMessage` into an
existing `BatchedFeMessage`; returns `None` on success and returns back
the incoming message in case merging isn't possible
- execution of a batched message
- unify the timeline handle acquisition & request span construction; it
now happen in the function that reads the protocol message
- Implement serial and pipelined model
- serial: what we had before any of the batching changes
- read one protocol message
- execute protocol messages
- pipelined: the design described above
- optionality for execution of the pipeline: either via concurrent
futures vs tokio tasks
- Pageserver config
- remove batching timeout field
- add ability to configure pipelining mode
- add ability to limit max batch size for pipelined configurations
(required for the rollout, cf
https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/20620 )
- ability to configure execution mode
- Tests
- remove `batch_timeout` parametrization
- rename `test_getpage_merge_smoke` to `test_throughput`
- add parametrization to test different max batch sizes and execution
moes
- rename `test_timer_precision` to `test_latency`
- rename the test case file to `test_page_service_batching.py`
- better descriptions of what the tests actually do
## On the holding The `TimelineHandle` in the pending batch
While batching, we hold the `TimelineHandle` in the pending batch.
Therefore, the timeline will not finish shutting down while we're
batching.
This is not a problem in practice because the concurrently ongoing
`get_vectored` call will fail quickly with an error indicating that the
timeline is shutting down.
This results in the Execution stage returning a `QueryError::Shutdown`,
which causes the pipeline / entire page service connection to shut down.
This drops all references to the
`Arc<Mutex<Option<Box<BatchedFeMessage>>>>` object, thereby dropping the
contained `TimelineHandle`s.
- => fixes https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9850
# Performance
Local run of the benchmarks, results in [this empty
commit](1cf5b1463f)
in the PR branch.
Key take-aways:
* `concurrent-futures` and `tasks` deliver identical `batching_factor`
* tail latency impact unknown, cf
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9837
* `concurrent-futures` has higher throughput than `tasks` in all
workloads (=lower `time` metric)
* In unbatchable workloads, `concurrent-futures` has 5% higher
`CPU-per-throughput` than that of `tasks`, and 15% higher than that of
`serial`.
* In batchable-32 workload, `concurrent-futures` has 8% lower
`CPU-per-throughput` than that of `tasks` (comparison to tput of
`serial` is irrelevant)
* in unbatchable workloads, mean and tail latencies of
`concurrent-futures` is practically identical to `serial`, whereas
`tasks` adds 20-30us of overhead
Overall, `concurrent-futures` seems like a slightly more attractive
choice.
# Rollout
This change is disabled-by-default.
Rollout plan:
- https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/20620
# Refs
- epic: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9376
- this sub-task: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9377
- the abandoned attempt to improve batching timeout resolution:
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/9820
- closes https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9850
- fixes https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9835
Running locally
First make a release build. The -s flag silences a lot of output, and makes it
easier to see if you have compile errors without scrolling up.
BUILD_TYPE=release CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS="--features=testing" make -s -j8
You may also need to run ./scripts/pysync.
Then run the tests
DEFAULT_PG_VERSION=16 NEON_BIN=./target/release poetry run pytest test_runner/performance
Some handy pytest flags for local development:
-xtells pytest to stop on first error-sshows test output-kselects a test to run--timeout=0disables our default timeout of 300s (seesetup.cfg)--preserve-database-filesto skip cleanup--out-dirto produce a JSON with the recorded test metrics
What performance tests do we have and how we run them
Performance tests are built using the same infrastructure as our usual python integration tests. There are some extra fixtures that help to collect performance metrics, and to run tests against both vanilla PostgreSQL and Neon for comparison.
Tests that are run against local installation
Most of the performance tests run against a local installation. This is not very representative of a production environment. Firstly, Postgres, safekeeper(s) and the pageserver have to share CPU and I/O resources, which can add noise to the results. Secondly, network overhead is eliminated.
In the CI, the performance tests are run in the same environment as the other integration tests. We don't have control over the host that the CI runs on, so the environment may vary widely from one run to another, which makes the results across different runs noisy to compare.
Remote tests
There are a few tests that marked with pytest.mark.remote_cluster. These tests do not set up a local environment, and instead require a libpq connection string to connect to. So they can be run on any Postgres compatible database. Currently, the CI runs these tests on our staging and captest environments daily. Those are not an isolated environments, so there can be noise in the results due to activity of other clusters.
Noise
All tests run only once. Usually to obtain more consistent performance numbers, a test should be repeated multiple times and the results be aggregated, for example by taking min, max, avg, or median.
Results collection
Local test results for main branch, and results of daily performance tests, are stored in a neon project deployed in production environment. There is a Grafana dashboard that visualizes the results. Here is the dashboard. The main problem with it is the unavailability to point at particular commit, though the data for that is available in the database. Needs some tweaking from someone who knows Grafana tricks.
There is also an inconsistency in test naming. Test name should be the same across platforms, and results can be differentiated by the platform field. But currently, platform is sometimes included in test name because of the way how parametrization works in pytest. I.e. there is a platform switch in the dashboard with neon-local-ci and neon-staging variants. I.e. some tests under neon-local-ci value for a platform switch are displayed as Test test_runner/performance/test_bulk_insert.py::test_bulk_insert[vanilla] and Test test_runner/performance/test_bulk_insert.py::test_bulk_insert[neon] which is highly confusing.