Handling processing overhead due to request time out - algorithm

Consider a service running on a server for a customer c1,but customer c1 times out after 'S' sec for what so ever be the reason so customer again fires the same request ,so server is running duplicate query hence it gets overloaded, resolve this glitch. Please help me !!!

I assume you are on the server side and hence cannot control multiple requests coming in from the same client.
Every client should be having an IP address associated with them. In your load balancer(if you have one) or in your server you need to keep an in-memory cache which keeps track of all requests, their IP addresses, timestamp when request originated and timestamp when request processing finished. Next you define and appropriate time measure - which should be near about 70-80% percentile of processing time for all your requests. Lets say X seconds.
Now, before you accept any request at your loadbalancer/ server you need to check in this in-memory cache whether the same IP has sent the same request and the time elapsed since the last request is less than X. If so do not accept this request and instead send a custom error stating something like "previous request still under processing. Please try after some time".
In case IP address is not enough for identifying a client, as the same client may be sending requests to different endpoints on your server for different services, then you need to store another identifier which maybe a kind of token/session identifier - such as c1 or customer id in your case. Ideally, a customer can send only 1 request from 1 IP Address to an endpoint at any 1 point of time. Just in case you have mobile and web interfaces then you can add the channel-type(web/mobile/tablet) as well to the list of identifying parameters .
So now, a combination of - customer id(c1), IP address, request URL,request time, channel-type will always be unique for a request coming in. Using a key of all these parameters in your cache to uniquely fetch information for a request and validating whether to start processing the request or send a custom error message to prevent overloading the server with re-requests - should solve the problem defined above.
Note - 'S' seconds i.e. client-side timeout - given that the client-side timeout is not in our control - should not concern the server-side and will have no bearing on the design I have detailed above.

Related

Socket.io - different maxHttpBufferSize values depending on the nature of the request

I am creating an application that allows users to submit JSON or Base64 image data via socket.io
The goal I am trying to achieve is:
if JSON is submitted, the message can have a maximum size of 1MB
if a Base64 image is submitted, the message can have a maximum size of 5MB
From the socket.io docs I can see that:
you can specify a maxHttpBufferSize option value that allows you to limit the maximum message size
namespaces allow you to split logic over a single connection
However, I can't figure out the correct way to get the functionality to work the way I have described above.
Would I need to:
set up 2 separate io instances on the server, one for JSON data and the other for Base64 images (therefore allowing me to set separate maxHttpBufferSize values for each), and then the client can use the correct instance, depending on what they want to submit (if so, what is the correct way of doing this?)
set up 1 instance with a maxHttpBufferSize of 5MB, and then add in my own custom logic to determine message sizes and prevent further actions if the data is JSON and over 1MB in size
set this up in some totally different way that I haven't thought of
Many thanks
From what I can see in the API, maxHttpBufferSize is a parameter for the underlying Engine.IO server (of which there is one instance per Socket.IO Server Instance). Obviously you're free to set up two servers but I doubt it makes sense to separate the system into two entirely different applications.
Talk of using Namespaces to separate logic is more about handling different messages at different endpoints (for example you would register a removeUserFromChat message handler to a user connecting via an /admin namespace, but you wouldn't want to register this to a user connecting via the /user namespace).
In the most recent socket server I set up, I defined my own protocol where part of the response would contain a HTTP status code, as well as a description that could be displayed to the user. For example I would return 200 on success. If I was uploading a file via a REST HTTP Interface, I would expect a 400 (BAD REQUEST) response if my request couldn't be processed - and I believe that this makes sense for your use case. Alternatively you could define your own custom 4XX error code if the file is too large, and handle this in your UI purely based on the code returned. Obviously you don't need to follow the HTTP protocol, and the design decisions are ultimately up to you, but in my opinion it makes sense to return some kind of error response in your message handler.
I suspect that the maxHttpBufferSize has different use at lower levels than your use case. When sending content over network, content is split into 'n bytes' of packets and when a application writes 'n' bytes, the network sends a packet over network (the less the n, more overhead due to network headers. The more the n, high latency because of waiting involved in accumulating n bytes before sending). Documentation is not clear about maxHttpBufferSize but it could be the packet size (n) configuration, not limit on the max data on connection.
It seems, http request header Content-Length might serve your purpose. It gives the actual object size based on that you can make a decision.

Batch HTTP Request Performance gain

I want to know the performance gain from doing a HTTP batch request. is it only reducing the number of round trips to one instead of n times where n is the number of HTTP requests? if it's like that I guess you can keep http connection opened and send your http messages through and once finish you can close it to get performance gain.
The performance gain of doing batch requests depends on what you are doing with them. However just as an agnostic approach here you go:
If you can manage a keep-alive connection, yes this means you don't have to do the initial handshake for the connection. That reduces some overhead and certainly saves time spent handling subsequent packets along this connection. Because of this you can "pipeline" requests and decrease overall load latency (all else not considered). However, requests in HTTP1.1 are still bound to be FIFO so you can have hangups. This is where batching is useful. Since even with a keep-alive connection you can have this hangup (HTTP/2 will allow asynchronous handling) you can still have some significant latency between requests.
This can be mitigated further by batching. If possible you lump all the data needed for subsequent requests into one and this way everything is processed together and sent back as one response. Sure it may take a bit longer to handle a single packet as opposed to the sequential method, but your throughput is increased per time because roundtrip latency for request->response is not multiplied. Thus you get an even better performance gain in terms of requests handling speeds.
Naturally this approach depends on what you're doing with the requests for it to be effective. Sometimes batching can put too much stress on a server if you have a lot of users doing this with a lot of data so to increase overall concurrent throughput across all users you sometimes need to take the technically slower sequential approach to balance things out. However, the best approach will be known by you upon some simple monitoring and analysis.
And as always, don't optimize prematurely :)
Consider this typical scenario: the client has the identifier of a resource which resides in a database behind an HTTP server, of which resource they want to get an object representation.
The general flow to execute that goes like this:
The client code constructs an HTTP client.
The client builds an URI and sets the proper HTTP request fields.
Client issues the HTTP request.
Client OS initiates a TCP connection, which the server accepts.
Client sends the request to the server.
Server OS or webserver parses the request.
Server middleware parses the request components into a request for the server application.
Server application gets initialized, the relevant module is loaded and passed the request components.
The module obtains an SQL connection.
Module builds an SQL query.
The SQL server finds the record and returns that to the module.
Module parses the SQL response into an object.
Module selects the proper serializer through content negotiation, JSON in this case.
The JSON serializer serializes the object into a JSON string.
The response containing the JSON string is returned by the module.
Middleware returns this response to the HTTP server.
Server sends the response to the client.
Client fires up their version of the JSON serializer.
Client deserializes the JSON into an object.
And there you have it, one object obtained from a webserver.
Now each of those steps along the way is heavily optimized, because a typical server and client execute them so many times. However, even if one of those steps only take a millisecond, when you for example have fifty resources to obtain, those milliseconds add up fast.
So yes, HTTP keep-alive cuts away the time the TCP connection takes to build up and warm up, but each and every other step will still have to be executed fifty times. Yes, there's SQL connection pooling, but every query to the database adds overhead.
So instead of going through this flow fifty separate times, if you have an endpoint that can accept fifty identifiers at once, for example through a comma-separated query string or even a POST with a body, and return their JSON representation at once, that will always be way faster than individual requests.

Is there a RESTful way to determine whether a POST will succeed?

Is there a RESTful way to determine whether a POST (or any other non-idempotent verb) will succeed? This would seem to be useful in cases where you essentially need to do multiple idempotent requests against different services, any of which might fail. It would be nice if these requests could be done in a "transaction" (i.e. with support for rollback), but since this is impossible, an alternative is to check whether each of the requests will succeed before actually performing them.
For example suppose I'm building an ecommerce system that allows people to buy t-shirts with custom text printed on them, and this system requires integrating with two different services: a t-shirt printing service, and a payment service. Each of these has a RESTful API, and either might fail. (e.g. the printing company might refuse to print certain words on a t-shirt, say, and the bank might complain if the credit card has expired.) Is there any way to speculatively perform these two requests, so my system will only proceed with them if both requests appear valid?
If not, can this problem be solved in a different way? Creating a resource via a POST with status = pending, and changing this to status = complete if all requests succeed? (DELETE is more tricky...)
HTTP defines the 202 status code for exactly your scenario:
202 Accepted
The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed. The request might or might not eventually be acted upon, as it might be disallowed when processing actually takes place. There is no facility for re-sending a status code from an asynchronous operation such as this.
The 202 response is intentionally non-committal. Its purpose is to allow a server to accept a request for some other process (perhaps a batch-oriented process that is only run once per day) without requiring that the user agent's connection to the server persist until the process is completed. The entity returned with this response SHOULD include an indication of the request's current status and either a pointer to a status monitor or some estimate of when the user can expect the request to be fulfilled.
Source: HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definition
This is similar to 201 Created, except that you are indicating that the request has not been completed and the entity has not yet been created. Your response would contain a URL to the resource representing the "order request", so clients can check the status of the order through this URL.
To answer your question more directly: There is no way to "test" whether a request will succeed before you make it, because you're asking for clairvoyance.
It's not possible to foresee the range of technical problems that could occur when you attempt to make a request in the future. The network may be unavailable, the server may not be able to access its database or external systems it depends on for functioning, there may be a power-cut and the server is offline, a stray neutrino could wander into your memory and bump a 0 to a 1 causing a catastrophic kernel fault.
In order to consume a remote service you need to account for possible failures of any request in isolation of any other processes.
For your specific problem, if the services have no transactional safety, you can't bake any in there and you have to deal with this in a more real-world way. A few options off the top of my head:
Get the T-Shirt company to give you a "test" mechanism, so you can see whether they'll process any given order without actually placing it. It could be that placing an order with them is a two-phase operation, where you construct the order in the first phase (at which time they validate its creation) and then you subsequently ask the order to be processed (after you have taken payment successfully).
Take the credit-card payment first and move your order into a "paid" state. Then attempt to fulfil the order with the T-Shirt service as an asynchronous process. If fulfilment fails and you can identify that the customer tried to get something printed the company is not prepared to produce, you will have to contact them to change their order or produce a refund.
Most organizations will adopt the second approach, due to its technical simplicity and reduced risk to the business. It also has the benefit of being able to cope with the T-Shirt service not being available; the asynchronous process simply waits until the service is available and completes the order at that time.
Exactly. That can be done as you suggest in your last sentence. The idea would be to decopule resource creation (that will always work unless network failures) that represents an "ongoing request" of the "order acceptation", that can be later decided. As POST returns a "Location" header, you can then retrieve in any moment the "status" of your request.
At some point it may become either accepted or rejected. This may be intantaneous or it may take some time, so you have to design your service with these restrictions (i.e. allowing the client to check if his/her order is accepted, or running some kind of hourly/daily service that collect accepted requests).

How to get intermediate response from server?

I am trying to check pop and smtp values entered by user.. I wish to validate that pop and smtp say for example(pop.gmail.com,smtp.gmail.com) which is entered by user is correct or wrong.
For that I am sending only one request to server by taking both pop and smtp values entered by user which will do two tasks
1. Checks user entered pop by making connection to that particular server ,
2. Checks user entered smtp by sending 1 mail to some dummy mail id..
I finished all these tasks..
But now what my requirement is, I have to show the user after validating each thing.. I mean in ui i have to show as
POP connection Checked.. ok
smtp connection Checked.. ok like that.
But i sent only one request to server for doing both these tasks..So i need to get intermediate status from server after finishing each tasks..So only i can update in client side UI.. But i don't know is it possible to get intermediate responses from server for a single request... Any idea friends? If so can you come up with a little bit of code...
Expecting the suggestions?
you should take a look in the long polling technique, it is possible to retrieve partial response but it doesn't work on all browsers.
You can use HEAD request instead of GET or POST which only return HTTP header
Slightly off topic - but sending a dummy mail can be "dangerous".
Many servers "note" if you try and send to a local address, which does not exist. For example - if the server's domain is "whatever.com" and you send to a random address, say aaa#whatever.com, and "aaa" is not a valid user, then the server notices this.
The server may then take an action like blocking you, as a sender, for a period of time. (This helps to reduce spam from dictionary attacks.) So your "test" ends up effectively blocking the real mail from being delivered.
The reverse is also true. Let's say you try to send to an external address, which you know is valid (your own email address for example) as the test. In this case the from address must be a valid internal address. If you use an invalid internal address, or worse an address which is not internal, it's likely the server will refuse to deliver the mail (at best) and at worst again institute a temporary block.
The key factor in both these situations is that although the SMTP protocol is very "loose", SMTP servers watch very closely for "bad behavior" because this is one way of distinguishing a spamming program. So any hide of "incorrect" behavior can lead to it arbitrarily refusing to accept your mails (usually for a limited period of time.)
Incidentally, back to your original question.
Both of your tests are pretty much instantaneous. Even if the email server is on the other side of the world you can do both checks inside a couple seconds. So chances are even if you send back 2 packets, to the user they'll appear as "arriving together". And since 1 request from the browser can only handle 1 response from the server you would need to send the response in 2 packets.
ie do first test - send first part of response - do second test - send second part of response.
For a normal HTTP packet this is no big deal. Do some sort of flush / send after the first response is ready, and then again after the second response. The browser is used to displaying partial pages as they arrive.
However for an AJAX request you'll need to get into your framework at quite a low level. Most frameworks, that I'm aware of, require the incoming Async packet to be "complete" before they start to parse it. This is especially true if the packet is formatted as say xml where partial parsing is useless in pretty much all cases.

Http request response debugging

I have two phones connected to a Wifi access point, both have ip in the private range.
One of the phones has a HTTP server running on it and the other phone acts like a client. The client sends GET requests data to the server as name/
value pairs in the URL query string. At the moment the server is only sending on HTTP.OK on receiving the query string.
What is happening is the client may not be stationary and maybe moving around so it may not be possible for it to be in range always of the Wifi access
point due to that I am not getting all the data sent from the client at the server end.
I want to ensure that all data sent is actually received by the server.
What kind of error correction should I implement? Can I check for some relevant HTTP error codes or the like?
If the HTTP server doesn't receive the entire query string in a GET request, then the HTTP request cannot possibly be valid as these parameters are on the first line of the request.
The server will be unable to handle the request and in this case will likely return status code 400 (Bad Request).
If your client receives this (which seems unlikely that it would fail to transmit the request, yet receive the response), then you'll know to retransmit. In general, the properties of TCP connections like automatic retransmissions, checksums and timeouts should be all you need for successful delivery, or to determine failure.
You need to check for timeouts on the client. That depends on the process/language used.
EDIT: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Using_Http_and_Https_in_Java_ME
Looks like you simply set a timeout and catch IO errors.
Premature optimization.
Connection integrity is already dealt with in the lower parts of the network stack. So if there were any dropouts in the middle of the request (assuming it spanned more than a single packet) the TCP stack would attempt to recover them before passing the data on to the server.
If you need to prove this to yourself, then just add a checksum as the last part of the query.
C.

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