Lots of retries and transaction expired on NEAR localnet - nearprotocol

We created a test chain that runs locally on a computer, launches a chain with 4 validators (quite similar to localnet) and from there, we are deploying a smart contract testing various aspect of the chain (failed transactions, async receipts, args encoding, logs, and such stuff).
Everything can be run/seen here https://github.com/streamingfast/battlefield-near (it’s a bunch of scripts that facilitate running this network and the transactions).
When I deploy my contract, it always requires like 2 to 3 retries before getting the transaction to pass correctly. More than that, I would say in 33% of the cases, I reach the retry limit and get a Transaction Expired error.
This seems weird to me that such amount of retry is required to deploy a contract assuming that everything runs locally on my computer. When deploying the contract, it’s the only transaction going in, so there should be no congestion involved (there should be actually no traffic at all).
How the contract deployment can pass right away without retries and without never expiring the transaction?

It is possible that the network is too fast given that, as you mentioned, it is a one-node local network. This may cause the transaction to expire quickly, especially given that the default value for expiration on localnet is quite small I believe. Check for transaction_validity_period in your genesis.json and see if setting it to a large number helps.

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How resilient is reporting to Trains server?

How would Trains go about sending any missing data to the server in the following scenarios?
Internet connection breaks temporarily while running an experiment
Internet connection breaks and doesn't come back before the experiment ends (any manual way to send all the data that was missed?)
The machine running Trains server resets in the middle of an experiment
Disclaimer: I'm part of the allegro.ai Trains team
Trains will auto retry to send logs, basically forever. The logs/metrics are sent in a background thread so it should not interfere with execution. You can set the backoff parameter, to control the retry frequency, by adjusting the sdk.network.iteration.retry_backoff_factor_sec parameter in your ~/trains.conf file, see example here
The experiment will try to flush all metrics to the backend when the experiment ends, i.e. the process will wait at_exit until all metrics are sent. This means if the connection was dropped, it will retry until it is up again. If the experiment was aborted manually, there is no way to capture/resend those lost metric reports. That said with the new 0.16 version, offline mode was introduced. This way one can run the entire experiment offline, then later report all logs/metrics/artifacts.
The Trains-Server machine is fully stateless (the states themselves are stored in the databases on the machine) this means that from the experiment perspective, the connection was dropped for a few minutes and then it's available again. To your question, if the Trains-Server restarted, it is transparent to all experiments and they continue as usual, no reports will be lost.

Is it possible to configure a Consul health check that can be set to critical, but defaults to healthy after a TTL?

My main goal is to avoid a big delay in the health status updating to "Critical" when I can predict my service will go down.
I would combine this with the http health check already in place.
Considered solutions:
I have tried a TTL check, but this introduces the burden of converting the service to constantly send it's current status.
Using a TTL check with a really high ttl + sending "healthy" once on restart came to mind, but if this initial request fails the service stays unhealthy way too long.
Reducing the interval of my http health-check would mitigate the problem a bit, but also creates a bigger overhead.
If you can predict the service will go down, you should consider putting it into maintenance mode. This will remove it from DNS and API results immediately. Here is the link to the documentation on how to put service into the maintenance mode.
Health checks will always have a delay, since they are executed periodically and are designed to monitor service for unexpected downtime. Best way to have minimal impact on users, if you know service is going down due to update/upgrade/reboot/decomissioning, is to remove it before doing any work on it.

Load testing WCF services gives huge (>200 sec) responses

I have a service being load tested by a third party. A few minutes after starting, we start to see requests hanging for a very long period of time and the caller ultimately times out (after 60 seconds).
They are testing with 15 users with each user using two devices at once, so a total of 30 connections.
The service is a simple façade to a more complex operation, calling an external system. Benchmarking our communications to the external system looks as though everything is responding in the time we would expect (sub 200ms).
The IIS logs reveals a bunch of very high requests (> 200sec) which ultimately do return a 200 and have Win32 error code ERROR_NETNAME_DELETD (error 64). I have checked the Service Log and can match up the response to the request (based on the SOAP message id) and can see that we do eventually respond with the correct information (although the client has long given up).
Any ideas as to what could be causing this behavior? We're hosting in IIS using wsHttpBinding and we're using WS-Security with x509 certificates (message & transport encryption).
We don't have benchmark logging inside of our service but the code is a very simple mapping of the WCF request to the server request, making the request, and mapping the response to the WCF response. We do this manually and there is no parsing involved (straight assignments).
After a detailed investigation, including getting Microsoft support involved we were hitting up against the serviceThrottling defaults, specifically the maxConcurrentSessions. We determined this from perfmon - there is a counter for this. We were unsure as to why we saw this as the service behaved when called with a .NET client.
It turns out that the Java consumer of this application, using CXF, was not respecting the WSDL (specifically the bit about WS-SecureConversation) and closing sessions out when it closed its connection.
Our solution was to jack up the maxConcurrentSessions to a high number, set the inactivityTimeout down low (to a minute) to force session abandonment. In addition, we set establishSecurityContext to false to avoid the WSS negotiation consuming an additional session.
The solution is inelegant as the service logs are littered with errors about forced session closures, but it fixed the issue we were seeing here. Unfortunately we had a requirement for WS-Security so our solution needed to stick with that.
I hope this helps someone as this was an interesting and time consuming problem to pin down.

Azure in role cache exceptions when service scales

I am using Windows Azure SDK 2.2 and have created an Azure cloud service that uses an in-role cache.
I have 2 instances of the service running under normal conditions.
When the services scales (up to 3 instances, or back down to 2 instances), I get lots of DataCacheExceptions. These are often accompanied by Azure db connection failures from the process going in inside the cache. (If I don't find the entry I want in the cache, I get it from the db and put it into the cache. All standard stuff.)
I have implemented retry processes on the cache gets and puts, and use the ReliableSqlConnection object with a retry process for db connection using the Transient Fault Handling application block.
The retry process uses a fixed interval retrying every second for 5 tries.
The failures are typically;
Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.DataCacheException: ErrorCode:SubStatus:There is a temporary failure. Please retry later
Any idea why the scaling might cause these exceptions?
Should I try a less aggressive retry policy?
Any help appreciated.
I have also noticed that I am getting a high percentage (> 70%) cache miss rate and when the system is struggling, there is high cpu utilisation (> 80%).
Well, I haven't been able to find out any reason for the errors I am seeing, but I have 'fixed' the problem, sort of!
When looking at the last few days processing stats, it is clear the high cpu usage corresponds with the cloud service having 'problems'. I have changed the service to use two medium instances instead of two small instances.
This seems to have solved the problem, and the service has been running quite happily, low cpu usage, low memory usage, no exceptions.
So, whilst still not discovering what the source of the problems were, I seem to have overcome them by providing a bigger environment for the service to run in.
--Late news!!! I noticed this morning that from about 06:30, the cpu usage started to climb, along with the time taken for the service to process as it should. Errors started appearing and I had to restart the service at 10:30 to get things back to 'normal'. Also, when restarting the service, the OnRoleRun process threw loads of DataCacheExceptions before it started running again, 45 minutes later.
Now all seems well again, and I will monitor for the next hours/days...
There seems to be no explanation for this, remote desktop to the instances show no exceptions in the event log, other logging is not showing application problems, so I am still stumped.

Is there a way asterisk reconnect calls when internet connection is missed

For being specific, I am using asterisk with a Heartbeat active/pasive cluster. There are 2 nodes in the cluster. Let's suppose Asterisk1 Asterisk2. Eveything is well configured in my cluster. When one of the nodes looses internet connection, asterisk service fails or the Asterisk1 is turned off, the asterisk service and the failover IP migrate to the surviving node (Asterisk2).
The problem is if we actually were processing a call when the Asterisk1 fell down asterisk stops the call and I can redial until asterisk service is up in asterisk2 (5 seconds, not a bad time).
But, my question is: Is there a way to make asterisk work like skype when it looses connection in a call? I mean, not stopping the call and try to reconnect the call, and reconnect it when asterisk service is up in Asterisk2?
There are some commercial systems that support such behavour.
If you want do it on non-comercial system there are 2 way:
1) Force call back to all phones with autoanswer flag. Requerment: Guru in asterisk.
2) Use xen and memory mapping/mirror system to maintain on other node vps with same memory state(same running asterisk). Requirment: guru in XEN. See for example this: http://adrianotto.com/2009/11/remus-project-full-memory-mirroring/
Sorry, both methods require guru knowledge level.
Note, if you do sip via openvpn tunnel, very likly you not loose calls inside tunnel if internet go down for upto 20 sec. That is not exactly what you asked, but can work.
Since there is no accepted answer after almost 2 years I'll provide one: NO. Here's why.
If you failover from one Asterisk server 1 to Asterisk server 2, then Asterisk server 2 has no idea what calls (i.e. endpoint to endpoing) were in progress. (Even if you share a database of called numbers, use asterisk realtime, etc). If asterisk tried to bring up both legs of the call to the same numbers, these might not be the same endpoints of the call.
Another server cannot resume the SIP TCP session of the other server since it closed with the last server.
The MAC source/destination ports may be identical and your firewall will not know you are trying to continue the same session.
etc.....
If you goal is high availability of phone services take a look at the VoIP Info web site. All the rest (network redundancy, disk redundancy, shared block storage devices, router failover protocol, etc) is a distraction...focus instead on early DETECTION of failures across all trunks/routes/devices involved with providing phone service, and then providing the highest degree of recovery without sharing ANY DEVICES. (Too many HA solutions share a disk, channel bank, etc. that create a single point of failure)
Your solution would require a shared database that is updated in realtime on both servers. The database would be managed by an event logger that would keep track of all calls in progress; flagged as LINEUP perhaps. In the event a failure was detected, then all calls that were on the failed server would be flagged as DROPPEDCALL. When your fail-over server spins up and takes over -- using heartbeat monitoring or somesuch -- then the first thing it would do is generate a set of call files of all database records flagged as DROPPPEDCALL. These calls can then be conferenced together.
The hardest part about it is the event monitor, ensuring that you don't miss any RING or HANGUP events, potentially leaving a "ghost" call in the system to be erroneously dialed in a recovery operation.
You likely should also have a mechanism to build your Asterisk config on a "management" machine that then pushes changes out to your farm of call-manager AST boxen. That way any node is replaceable with any other.
What you should likely have is 2 DB servers using replication techniques and Linux High-Availability (LHA) (1). Alternately, DNS round-robin or load-balancing with a "public" IP would do well, too. These machine will likely be light enough load to host your configuration manager as well, with the benefit of getting LHA for "free".
Then, at least N+1 AST Boxen for call handling. N is the number of calls you plan on handling per second divided by 300. The "+1" is your fail-over node. Using node-polling, you can then set up a mechanism where the fail-over node adopts the identity of the failed machine by pulling the correct configuration from the config manager.
If hardware is cheap/free, then 1:1 LHA node redundancy is always an option. However, generally speaking, your failure rate for PC hardware and Asterisk software is fairly lower; 3 or 4 "9s" out of the can. So, really, you're trying to get last bit of distance to the "5th 9".
I hope that gives you some ideas about which way to go. Let me know if you have any questions, and please take the time to "accept" which ever answer does what you need.
(1) http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ahead-pack-pacemaker-high-availability-stack

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