Is there any way to have an asynchronous client and server in ZeroMQ, using the same TCP-port and many sockets?
I already tried the ROUTER/ROUTER pattern, but with no luck.
The plan is to have an asymmetric connection with send and receive patterns among processors. So a Processor-entity will be a Client and also be a Server at the same time.
Is there any way to have an asynchronous client and server in ZeroMQ, using the same TCP-port and many sockets ?
Yes, there is.
As a preventive step, in other words, before getting into troubles, best review the main conceptual differences in [ ZeroMQ hierarchy in less than a five seconds ] or other posts and discussions here.
The Yes above means, one-.bind()-many-.connect()-s, which composition still uses a just one <transport-class>://<a-class-specific-address>, that for a tcp:// transport-class on IPv4 means that one tcp://A.B.C.D:port# occupied for this whole 1:MANY-sockets-composition.
For obvious reasons, more complex compositions, like many-.bind()-s-many-.connect()-s, are possible, where feasible, given both the ZeroMQ infrastructure topology options and also socket-"in-band"-message-routing features are thus setup and used for smart-decisions on actual message-flow mechanics.
Related
I am trying to build a ZeroMQ pattern where,
There can be many clients connecting to a single server endpoint
Server will distribute incoming client tasks to available workers (will be mapped to the number of cores on the server)
These tasks are long running (in hours) and need to perform a lot of local I/O
During each task execution (iteration) there will be data/messages (potentially in order of [GB]s) sent back and forth between the client and the server worker
Client and server workers need to know if there are failures/errors on the peer side, so that they can recover (retry) or shutdown gracefully and try later
Based on the above, I presume that the ROUTER/DEALER pattern would be useful. PUB/SUB is discarded as I need to know if the peer fails.
I tried using various combinations of the ROUTER/DEALER pattern but I am unable to ensure that multiple messages from a client reach the same worker within an iteration. I understand that I need to implement a broker/forwarder/device that routes the incoming messages to the right recipient/handler/worker. But I am unable to map the frontend and backend sockets in the broker. I am looking at MajorDomo pattern, but I guess there has to be a simpler broker model that could just route the messages to the assigned worker. (not really get into services)
I am looking for some examples, if there are any or any guidance on what I may be missing. I am trying to build this in Golang.
Q : "What would be the right ZMQ Pattern?"
Based on the complex composition of all the requirements posted under items 1 - 5, I dare to say, The Right would be NOT to use a single one of the standard, built-in, ZeroMQ trivial primitive Communication Archetype Patterns, but to rather create a multi-layered application-specific composition of a ( M + N + 1 hot-standby robust-enough?) (self-resilient?) Signalling-Messaging infrastructure, that covers all your current ( and possibly extensible for any future one ) application-level requirements, like depicted here for a way simpler distributed-computing use-case, where but a trivial remote-SigKILL was implemented.
Yes, the best would be to create ( and maintain ) your own formalised signalling, that the application level can handle and interact across -- like the heart-beating for detecting dead-worker(s) + permitting to re-instate such failed jobs right on-detected failures (most probably re-located and/or re-scheduled to take place & respective resources not statically pre-mapped, but where physically most feasible at the re-instating moment of time - so even more telemetry signalling will help you decide about the re-instating of the such failed micro-jobs).
ZeroMQ is a fabulous framework right for such complex signalling and messaging hierarchies, so your System Architect's imagination is the only ceiling in this concept.
ZeroMQ will take the rest and do all the hard work nice and easily.
I have multiple servers, at any point, one and only one will be the leader whcih can respond to a request, all others just drop the request. The issue is that the client does not know which server is the leader.
I have tried using a pub socket on the client for the parallel request out, however I can't work out the right semantics for the response. In terms of how to get the server to respond to that specific client.
A hacky solution which I have tried is to have a sub socket on the client to pub sockets on all the servers, with the leader responding by publishing a message with a filter such that it only goes to the client.
However I am unable to receive any responses this way, the server believes that it sent the message and the client believes it subscribed to "" but then doesn't receive anything...
So I am wondering whether there is a more proper way of doing this? I have thought that potentially a dealer/router with sending to a specific client would work, however I am unsure how to do that.
Essentially I am trying to do a standard Req/Rep however doing the req in parallel to all the nodes, rather than round robin.
UPDATE: By sending the routing id of the dealer in the pub request, making the remote call idempotent (just returning pre-computed results on repeated attempts), and then sending the result back via a router, with message filtering on the receiving side, it now works.
Q : " is (there) a more proper way of doing this? "
Yes.
Start to apply the Maslow's Hammer rule:
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”
In other words, do not try use (one) hammer for solving every problem. PUB/SUB-archetype was designed to serve those-and-only-those multi-party Formal-Communications-Pattern archetypes, where many SUB-scribe to .recv() some PUB-lisher(s) .send()-broadcast messages, but nothing other.
Similarly, REQ/REP-archetype was defined and implemented so as to serve one-and-only-one multi-party distributed Formal-Communications-Pattern ( and will obviously not meet any use-case, which has any single other or even a slightly different requirement ).
Users often require some special, non-trivial features, that obviously were not a part of the said trivial Formal-Communications-Pattern archetype primitives ( those ready-made blocks, made available in the ZeroMQ toolbox ).
It is architecs' / designers' role to define, analyse and implement any more complex user-specific distributed-behaviour definition ( a protocol ) and to implement it, most often using a layered combination of the ready-made ZeroMQ primitives.
If in doubts, take a sheet of paper and pencil, draw a small crowd of kids on playground and sketch their "shouts", their "listening", their "silence", "waiting" and "doubts", their many or few "replies", their "voting" and "anger" of not being voted for by friends, their fight for a place on the Sun and their "persistence" not to let others take theirs turn and let 'em sit on the "swing" after releasing the so far pleasurable swinging oneselves.
All this is the part of finding the right mix of ( protocol-orchestrated ) levels of control and levels of freedom to act.
There we get the new, distributed-behaviour, tailor-made for your specific use-case.
Probability to find a ready-made primitive tool to match and fulfill any user-specific use case is limitlessly close to Zero ( sure, unless one's own, user-specific use-case requirements match all those of the primitive archetype, but that is not a user-specific use-case, but a re-use of an already implemented archetype for the very same situation, that was foreseen by the ZeroMQ fathers, wasn't it? )
Again, welcome to the art of Zen-of-Zero.
Maylike to readthis and this and this
When building a pub-sub service using ZeroMQ on a Linux system, is there any way to enforce concurrent subscriber limits?
For example, I might want to create a ZeroMQ publisher service on a resource-limited system, and want to prevent overloading the system by setting a limit of, say, 100 concurrent connections to the tcp publisher endpoint. After that limit is reached, all subsequent connection attempts from ZeroMQ subscribers would fail.
I understand ZeroMQ doesn't provide notifications about connect/disconnect, but I've been looking for socket options that might allow such limits -- so far, no luck.
Or is this something that should be handled at some other level, perhaps within the protocol?
Yes, ZeroMQ is a Can-Do messaging framework:
Besides the trivial Formal Communication Pattern Framework elements ( the library primitives ), the strongest powers behind the ZeroMQ is the ability to develop one's own messaging system(s).
In your case, it is enough to enrich the scene with a few additional things ... a SUB-process -> PUB-process message-flow-channel, so as to allow PUB-side process to count a number of SUB-process instances concurrently connected and to allow for a disconnect ( a step delegated rather "back" to a SUB-process side suicside move, as the classical PUB-process, intentionally, has no instrumentation to manage subscriptions ) once a limit is dynamically achieved.
Plus add some dynamics for the inter-node signalling to start re-counting and/or to equip the SUB-process side(s) with a self-advertising mechanism to push-keepAliveSIG-s to the PUB-side and expect this signalling to be a weak and informative-only indication as there are many real-world collisions, where decentralised node simply fail to deliver a "guaranteed-delivery" message(s) and a well designed, distributed, low-latency, high-performance system has to cope well with this reality and have the self-healing state-recovery policies designed and in-built into own behaviour.
( Fig. courtesy imatix/ZeroMQ )
The ZeroMQ library can be thought of as a very powerful LEGO-tool-box for designing cool distributed systems, than a ready-made / batteries-included, stiff, quasi-solution-for-just-a-few-academic-cases ( well, it might be considered such, but just for some no-brainer's life, while our lives are much more colourful & teasing, aren't they ? )
So, "How to?"
Worth, definitely worth a few days to read the both of Pieter Hintjens' books & a few weeks for shifting one's mind to start designing with the ZeroMQ full-powers on one's side.
With just a few Python add-on habits ( a zmq.Context() early-setup, and not forgetting a finally: aContext.term() )
There's no way that I'm aware of to configure ZMQ to limit connections automatically... however, you have other options to accomplish what you're looking for. Perhaps the "traditional" way to accomplish this is with a second set of "network communication" sockets... perhaps REQ/REP from subscriber to publisher, asking for permission to connect.
You also have the option, depending on your version of ZMQ (and I've never used it and I can't find it in 5 minutes of searching, so I don't know how recent your version must be) to use XPUB/XSUB sockets, which can accomplish bi-directional communication. You can connect with XSUB, send a subscribe request, then receive a positive or negative response (you might have to play with your subscriber topics to communicate directly with just the single subscriber, I'm not sure), and react accordingly.
Either way, you'll be allowing a connection of some sort between the two systems and then either allowing it or terminating it depending on the situation. This could be less than completely ideal since you'll have to carve out a little overhead to handle connections that you'll be refusing... let's say you're saturated at 100 clients and all of a sudden get 100 new subscribe requests... you may or may not be able to cope with that sort of burst traffic.
You can test out the overhead in alternative communication mediums... like you could publish a webservice that indicates subscriber status that a client could check first, but that may not be any better to have clients connecting that way.
If you're absolutely at the limit of your resources, you'll have to set up a second server to handle subscriber status:
Server 1 is your publisher. You could set it up with a PUB socket and a REP socket.
Server 2 is your status server. It has a REQ socket. Have it subscribe to something like "system-status" or some such thing as that. It will also have your mechanism for communicating with new subscribers, be that a ZMQ socket or a web service or whatever else.
A client will request status from your status server. The status server will send a request to your publisher, which will increment it's subscriber count and reply with success, or keep its subscriber count and reply with failure. This success or failure will be communicated back to the subscriber, which will use that information to connect or not.
Disconnections will have to be communicated in a similar way... and you'll have to use some sort of heartbeating round-robin to confirm clients weren't a victim of catastrophic failure.
This will allow your publisher to make intelligent choices about whether it has resources or not. If you just want to set a static number, you don't even need the connection between the status server and the publisher, you can just keep count on the status server... but just to ensure the overall health of the network then it's probably best not to go that simplistic route.
Anyway, those are just some ideas to accomplish what you're looking for. ZMQ gives you options with which to craft your solutions moreso than actual solutions.
I am writing a TCP Server that accepts connections from multiple clients, this server gathers data from the system that it's running on and transmits it to every connected client.
What design patterns would be best for this situation?
Example
Put all connections in an array, then loop through the array and send the data to each client one by one. Advantage: very easy to implement. Disadvantage: not very efficient when handling large amounts of data.
An easier way is to use some existing software to do this ... For example use https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=d5bedadd-e46f-4c97-af89-22d65ffee070 .
In case you want to write on your own you will need a list(linked list) to manage the connections.
Here is an example of a server http://examples.oreilly.com/jenut/Server.java
If you want to handle large amounts of data, one of the techniques is to have a queue associated with each of the subscribers at the server end. A multi-threaded program can send the data to the clients from those queues.
A number of patterns have been developed for distributed processing and servers, for instance in the ACE project: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/patterns-ace.html. The design might be focused around the events which announce either that data has been received and may be read, or that buffers have been emptied and more data may now be written. At least in the days when a 32-bit address space was the rule, you could have many more open connections than you had threads, so you would typically have a small number of threads waiting for events which announced that they could safely read or write without stalling until the other side co-operated. This may come from events, or from calls such as select() or poll() terminating. Patterns are also associated with http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#-MQ-in-a-Hundred-Words.
I'm creating a client-server relationship whereby a single client will be connected to an arbitrary number of servers using persistent TCP connections. The actual number of servers is as-of-yet undetermined, but the design goal is to shoot for 1000.
I found an example using direct Java NIO that nearly completely matches my mental model of how this could work:
http://drdobbs.com/jvm/184406242
In general, it opens up all of the channels and adds them to a single thread monitoring java.nio.channels.Selector. The use of the Selector, in particular, is what allows this to scale far better than using the standard thread-per-channel.
I would rather use a (slightly) higher level socket framework like Netty, than direct Java NIO. Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine how Netty would handle a case like this. That is, the examples and discussions I've found all tend to center around the server side, with accepting scores of concurrent connections.
But what about doing this from the client side? If I create a large number of channels and just wait on their events, how is Netty going to handle this at the back-end?
This isn't a direct answer to your question but I hope it is helpful nonetheless. Below, I describe a way for you to determine the answer that you are looking for. This is something that I recently did myself for an upcoming project.
Compared to OIO (Old IO) the asynchronous nature of the Netty framework and NIO will indeed provide much better memory and CPU usage characteristics for your application. The way buffers are handled in Netty will also be of benefit as it will help you to avoid copying byte buffers. The point is that all of the thread pool and NIO details will be handled for you allowing you to focus on your business logic. You mentioned the NIO Selector and you will benefit from that; the nice thing about Netty is that you get the benefits without having to worry about that implementation yourself because it is already done for you.
My understanding of the client side is that it is very similar to the server side and should provide you with commensurate performance gains (as long as your business logic doesn't introduce any performance issues).
My advice would be to throw together a prototype that more or less does what you want. Leave out any time consuming details and just add in the basic Netty handlers that you need to make something that works.
Then I would use jmeter to invoke your client to apply load to the server and client. Using something like jconsole or jvisualvm will show you the performance characteristics of the client and server under load. You could also try jprobe. You can add a listener in jmeter that will indicate the throughput. I would advise to use jmeter in server mode, the client on another machine and the server on yet another. This is a bit of up front work but if you decide to move forward you will have these tools ready to go for further testing as your proceed.
I suspect a decent Netty implementation that doesn't introduce any extraneous poorly performing components will give you the performance characteristics you are looking for, but, the only way to know for sure is to measure the system under the expected load.
You need to define what the expected load looks like and the desired performance characteristics under such load. Given these inputs you can measure your system to find out if it will meet your expectations. I personally don't think anyone can tell you if it will behave in the desired manner. You have to measure it. It's the only reliable way to know if the system can meet your needs.
I would rather use a (slightly) higher level socket framework like Netty, than direct Java NIO.
This is the correct approach. You can try implementing your own NIO server and client but why do that when you have the benefit of a highly refined framework at your fingertips already?
Netty will use up to x worker threads that handle the work for you. Each worker thread will have one Selector that is used to register Channels to it. The number of used workers is configurable and by default 2 * cpu-count.
As you can see in the example from Netty's doc [http://netty.io/docs/stable/guide/html/#start.9][1] you can control exactly the number of worker threads (meaning the number of underlying selectors) on the Client side.
Netty solves a numbers of issues that are very hard to handle in a simple way such as NIO vs SSL, and have a lot of default encoder/decoder for Zip... etc.
I started using Netty a few week ago and it was quite fast to came into. (I recommend dowloading the project with all the example code inside, there is a lot of documentation in it that can not be found on the url above.
ChannelFactory factory = new NioClientSocketChannelFactory(
Executors.newCachedThreadPool(),
Executors.newCachedThreadPool());
ClientBootstrap bootstrap = new ClientBootstrap(factory);
bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(new ChannelPipelineFactory() {
public ChannelPipeline getPipeline() {
return Channels.pipeline(new TimeClientHandler());
}
});
bootstrap.setOption("tcpNoDelay", true);
bootstrap.setOption("keepAlive", true);
bootstrap.connect(new InetSocketAddress(host, port));
Good luck,
Renaud