Backoff handling with goroutines - go

A program sends data to API using N concurrent workers as goroutines that consume data from a channel (Producer/Consumer pattern). API signals it can't handle more using HTTP status codes and demands a back-off.
How do I block all workers until back-off interval has passed?
Where to I put those requests that failed for retry?
Any links/pointers to this presumably already solved problem are much appreciated!

You can use select to control calling API
for _, k := range data {
select {
case <- backoff:
time.Sleep(backoffDuration)
default:
// Call API
// Check http status code and trigger backoff channel
backoff <- 1
}
}
Here is set-up:
Pass same backoff channel to all go routine
Setting backoffDuration. This is tricky as all go routines should be able to set this value and all others should be able to read it. One method can be using closure
Once these two are set-up you can control API calls by manipulating backoff channel and backoffDuration to control for how long routine will pause working.
Disclaimer: This is just pseudo-code.
You can check Hashicorp's library here. Looks like it will solve your problem

Related

How to deal with back pressure in GO GRPC?

I have a scenario where the clients can connect to a server via GRPC and I would like to implement backpressure on it, meaning that I would like to accept many simultaneous requests 10000, but have only 50 simultaneous threads executing the requests (this is inspired in Apache Tomcat NIO interface behaviour). I also would like the communication to be asynchronous, in a reactive manner, meaning that the client send the request but does not wait on it and the server sends the response back later and the client then execute some function registered to be executed.
How can I do that in GO GRPC? Should I use streams? Is there any example?
The GoLang API is a synchronous API, this is how GoLang usually works. You block in a while true loop until an event happens, and then you proceed to handle that event. With respect to having more simultaneous threads executing requests, we don't control that on the Client Side. On the client side at the application layer above gRPC, you can fork more Goroutines, each executing requests. The server side already forks a goroutine for each accepted connection and even stream on the connection so there is already inherent multi threading on the server side.
Note that there are no threads in go. Go us using goroutines.
The behavior described, is already built in to the GRC server. For example, see this option.
// NumStreamWorkers returns a ServerOption that sets the number of worker
// goroutines that should be used to process incoming streams. Setting this to
// zero (default) will disable workers and spawn a new goroutine for each
// stream.
//
// # Experimental
//
// Notice: This API is EXPERIMENTAL and may be changed or removed in a
// later release.
func NumStreamWorkers(numServerWorkers uint32) ServerOption {
// TODO: If/when this API gets stabilized (i.e. stream workers become the
// only way streams are processed), change the behavior of the zero value to
// a sane default. Preliminary experiments suggest that a value equal to the
// number of CPUs available is most performant; requires thorough testing.
return newFuncServerOption(func(o *serverOptions) {
o.numServerWorkers = numServerWorkers
})
}
The workers are at some point initialized.
// initServerWorkers creates worker goroutines and channels to process incoming
// connections to reduce the time spent overall on runtime.morestack.
func (s *Server) initServerWorkers() {
s.serverWorkerChannels = make([]chan *serverWorkerData, s.opts.numServerWorkers)
for i := uint32(0); i < s.opts.numServerWorkers; i++ {
s.serverWorkerChannels[i] = make(chan *serverWorkerData)
go s.serverWorker(s.serverWorkerChannels[i])
}
}
I suggest you read the server code yourself, to learn more.

API design for fire and forget endpoints

I’m currently maintaining a few HTTP APIs based on the standard library and gorilla mux and running in kubernetes (GKE).
We’ve adopted the http.TimeoutHandler as our “standard” way to have a consistent timeout error management.
A typical endpoint implementation will use the following “chain”:
MonitoringMiddleware => TimeoutMiddleware => … => handler
so that we can monitor a few key metrics per endpoint.
One of our API is typically used in a “fire and forget” mode meaning that clients will push some data and not care for the API response. We are facing the issue that
the Golang standard HTTP server will cancel a request context when the client connection is no longer active (godoc)
the TimeoutHandler will return a “timeout” response whenever the request context is done (see code)
This means that we are not processing requests to completion when the client disconnects which is not what we want and I’m therefore looking for solutions.
The only discussion I could find that somewhat relates to my issue is https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18527; however
The workaround is your application can ignore the Handler's Request.Context()
would mean that the monitoring middleware would not report the "proper" status since the Handler would perform the request processing in its goroutine but the TimeoutHandler would be enforcing the status and observability would be broken.
For now, I’m not considering removing our middlewares as they’re helpful to have consistency across our APIs both in terms of behaviours and observability. My conclusion so far is that I need to “fork” the TimeoutHandler and use a custom context for when an handler should not depend on the client waiting for the response or not.
The gist of my current idea is to have:
type TimeoutHandler struct {
handler Handler
body string
dt time.Duration
// BaseContext optionally specifies a function that returns
// the base context for controling if the server request processing.
// If BaseContext is nil, the default is req.Context().
// If non-nil, it must return a non-nil context.
BaseContext func(*http.Request) context.Context
}
func (h *TimeoutHandler) ServeHTTP(w ResponseWriter, r *Request) {
reqCtx := r.Context()
if h.BaseContext != nil {
reqCtx = h.BaseContext(r)
}
ctx, cancelCtx := context.WithTimeout(reqCtx, h.dt)
defer cancelCtx()
r = r.WithContext(ctx)
...
case <-reqCtx.Done():
tw.mu.Lock()
defer tw.mu.Unlock()
w.WriteHeader(499) // write status for monitoring;
// no need to write a body since no client is listening.
case <-ctx.Done():
tw.mu.Lock()
defer tw.mu.Unlock()
w.WriteHeader(StatusServiceUnavailable)
io.WriteString(w, h.errorBody())
tw.timedOut = true
}
The middleware BaseContext callback would return context.Background() for requests to the “fire and forget” endpoint.
One thing I don’t like is that in doing so I’m losing any context keys written so this new middleware would have strong usage constraints. Overall I feel like this is more complex than it should be.
Am I completely missing something obvious?
Any feedback on API instrumentation (maybe our middlewares are an antipattern) /fire and forget implementations would be welcomed!
EDIT: as most comments are that a request for which the client does not wait for a response has unspecified behavior, I checked for more information on typical clients for which this happens.
From our logs, this happens for user agents that seem to be mobile devices. I can imagine that connections can be much more unstable and the problem will likely not disappear.
I would therefore not conclude that I shouldn't find a solution since this is currently creating false-positive alerts.

How can I orchestrate concurrent request-response flow?

I'm new to concurrent programming, and have no idea what concepts to start with, so please be gentle.
I am writing a webservice as a front-end to a TCP server. This server listens to the port I give it, and returns the response to the TCP connection for each request.
Here is why I'm writing a web-service front-end for this server:
The server can handle one request at a time, and I'm trying to make it be able to process several inputs concurrently, by launching multiple processes and giving them a different port to listen on. For example, I want to launch 30 instances and tell them to listen on ports 20000-20029.
Our team uses PHP, and PHP does not have the capacity to launch server instances and maintain them concurrently, so I'm trying to write an API they can just send HTTP requests to.
So, here is the structure I have thought of.
I will have a main() function. This function launches the processes concurrently, then starts an HTTP server on port 80 and listens.
I have an http.Handler that adds the content of a request to a channel,.
I will have gorutines, one per server instance, that are in an infinite loop.
The code for the function mentioned in item three would be something like this:
func handleRequest(queue chan string) {
for {
request := <-queue
conn, err := connectToServer()
err = sendRequestToServer(conn)
response, err := readResponseFromServer(conn)
}
}
So, my http.Handler can simply do something like queue<- request to add the request to the queue, and handleRequest, which has blocked, waiting for the channel to have something to get, will simply get the request and continue on. When done, the loop finishes, execution comes back to the request := <-queue, and the same thing continues.
My problem starts in the http.Handler. It makes perfect sense to put requests in a channel, because multiple gorutines are all listening to it. However, how can these gorutines return the result to my http.Handler?
One way is to use a channel, let's call it responseQueue, that all of these gorutines would then write to. The problem is that when a response is added to the channel, I don't know which request it belongs to. In other words, when multiple http.Handlers send requests, each executing handler will not know which response the current message in the channel belongs to.
Is there a best practice, or a pattern, to send data to a gorutine from another gorutine and receive the data back?
Create a per request response channel and include it in the value sent to the worker. The handler receives from the channel. The worker sends the result to the channel.

Redis Pub/Sub Ack/Nack

Is there a concept of acknowledgements in Redis Pub/Sub?
For example, when using RabbitMQ, I can have two workers running on separate machines and when I publish a message to the queue, only one of the workers will ack/nack it and process the message.
However I have discovered with Redis Pub/Sub, both workers will process the message.
Consider this simple example, I have this go routine running on two different machines/clients:
go func() {
for {
switch n := pubSubClient.Receive().(type) {
case redis.Message:
process(n.Data)
case redis.Subscription:
if n.Count == 0 {
return
}
case error:
log.Print(n)
}
}
}()
When I publish a message:
conn.Do("PUBLISH", "tasks", "task A")
Both go routines will receive it and run the process function.
Is there a way of achieving similar behaviour to RabbitMQ? E.g. first worker to ack the message will be the only one to receive it and process it.
Redis PubSub is more like a broadcast mechanism.
if you want queues, you can use BLPOP along with RPUSH to get the same interraction. Keep in mind, RabbitMQ does all sorts of other stuff that are not really there in Redis. But if you looking for simple job scheduling / request handling style, this will work just fine.
No, Redis' PubSub does not guarantee delivery nor does it limit the number of possible subscribers who'll get the message.
Redis streams (now, with Redis 5.0) support acknowledgment of tasks as they are completed by a group.
https://redis.io/topics/streams-intro

using Go redis client (Redigo)

I'm using GO redis client redigo to write image to ~20 redis servers.
speed is an important factor here and I'm just sending set commands to the redis so I'm using Send and Flush without calling Receive.
after a few hours I'm getting "connection reset by peer" on the client.
I was wondering, does it have something to do with the fact that I don't call Receive?
maybe my RX queue just getting to its max capacity because I don't empty it with Receive?
Thank you.
An application must call Receive to clear the responses from the server and to check for errors. If the application is not pipelining commands, then it's best to call Do. Do combines Send, Flush and Receive.
If you don't care about errors, then start a goroutine to read the responses:
go func(c redis.Conn) {
for c.Err() == nil {
c.Receive()
}
}()

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