ibmcloud:CIS: what is the meaning of TTL value is 'automatically'? - ibm-cloud

My TTL value is set to 'automatically' for a record, what is the meaning? How long is the record in the cache?
Thank you in advance.

Taking DNS as an example.The TTL(time-to-live) will have a default value of Automatic but can be changed by the user. A proxied DNS record will always have a TTL of Automatic, so a newly proxied record will change to this configuration during this change.
DNS change propagation times depend on the time-to-live (TTL) setting
for the DNS record.
The default TTL is one day, which means any modifications to a domain
name take one day to propagate throughout the entire internet. TTL can
be lowered if you plan to make changes frequently, however, the lower
the TTL is, the higher the load becomes on the name server. Higher
loads have the potential to increase the response time to end users,
which could impact their overall satisfaction.
The higher the TTL setting, the higher DNS performance will be due to
local ISP caching. The lower the TTL setting, the lower DNS
performance will be due to increased name resolution.
To verify TTL, check the Start of Authority (SOA) record for the
domain. A great tool for reviewing domain information is offered by
CentralOps.net
TTL is listed in seconds. Divide by 60 to convert TTL to minutes, or
by 3600 to convert to hours.
For browser Cache TTL, refer the CIS API docs here

Related

How to read/write to secondary member of a MongoDB replica-set?

I am currently planning some server infrastructure. I have two servers in different locations. My apps (apis and stuff) are running on both of them. The client connects to the nearest (best connection). In case of failure of one server the other can process the requests. I want to use mongodb for my projects. The first idea is to use a replica set, therefore I can ensure the data is consistent. If one server fails the data is still accessible and the secondary switches to primary. When the app on the primary server wants to use the data, it is fine, but the other server must connect to to the primary server in order to handle data (that would solve the failover, but not the "best connection" problem). In Mongodb there is an option to read data from secondary servers, but then I have to ensure, that the inserts (only possible on primary) are consistent on every secondary. There is also an option for this "writeConcern". Is it possible to somehow specify “writeConcern on specific secondary”? Because If an add a second secondary without the apps on it, "writeConcern" on every secondary would not be necessary. And if I specify a specific value I don't really know on which secondary the data is available, right ?
Summary: I want to reduce the connections between the servers when the api is called.
Please share some thought or Ideas to fix my problem.
Writes can only be done on primaries.
To control which secondary the reads are directed to, you can use max staleness as well as tags.
that the inserts (only possible on primary) are consistent on every secondary.
I don't understand what you mean by this phrase.
If you have two geographically separated datacenters, A and B, it is physically impossible to write data in A and instantly see it in B. You must either wait for the write to propagate or wait for the read to fetch data from the remote node.
To pay the cost at write time, set your write concern to the number of nodes in the deployment (2, in your proposal). To pay the cost at read time, use primary reads.
Note that merely setting write concern equal to the number of nodes doesn't make all nodes have the same data at all times - it just makes your application only consider the write successful when all nodes have received it. The primary can still be ahead of a particular secondary in terms of operations committed.
And, as noted in comments, a two-node replica set will not accept writes unless both members are operational, which is why it is generally not a useful configuration to employ.
Summary: I want to reduce the connections between the servers when the api is called.
This has nothing to do with the rest of the question, and if you really mean this it's a premature optimization.
If what you want is faster network I/O I suggest looking into setting up better connectivity between your application and your database (for example, I imagine AWS would offer pretty good connectivity between their various regions).

.Net Core connection pool exhausted (postgres) under heavy load spike, when new pod instances are created

I have an application which runs stable under heavy load, but only when the load increase in graduate way.
I run 3 or 4 pods at the same time, and it scales to 8 or 10 pods when necessary.
The standard requests per minute is about 4000 (means 66 req-per-second per node, means 16 req-per-second per single pod).
There is a certain scenario, when we receive huge load spike (from 4k per minute to 20k per minute). New pods are correctly created, then they start to receive new load.
Problem is, that in about 10-20% of cases newly created pod struggles to handle initial load, DB requests are taking over 5000ms, piling up, finally resulting in exception that connection pool was exhausted: The connection pool has been exhausted, either raise MaxPoolSize (currently 200) or Timeout (currently 15 seconds)
Here goes screenshots from NewRelic:
I can see that other pods are doing well, and also that after initial struggle, all pods are handling the load without any issue.
Here goes what I did when attempting to fix it:
Get rid of non-async calls. I had few lines of blocking code inside async methods. I've changed everything to async. I do not longer have non-async methods.
Removed long-running transactions. We had long running transactions, like this:
beginTransactionAsync
selectDataAsync
saveDataAsync
commitTransactionAsync
which I refactored to:
- selectDataAsync
- saveDataAsync // under-the-hood EF core short lived transaction
This helped a lot, but did not solve problem completely.
Ensure some connections are always open and ready. We added Minimum Pool Size=20 to connection string, to always keep at least 20 connections open.
This also helped, but still sometimes pods struggle.
Our pods starts properly after Readiness probe returns success. Readiness probe checks connection to the DB using standard .NET core healthcheck.
Our connection string have MaxPoolSize=100;Timeout=15; setting.
I am of course expecting that initially new pod instance will need some spin-up time when it operates at lower parameters, but I do not expect that so often pod will suffocate and throw 90% of errors.
Important note here:
I have 2 different DbContexts sharing same connection string (thus same connection pool). Each of this DbContext accesses different schema in the DB. It was done to have a modular architecture. DbContexts never communicate with each other, and are never used together in same request.
My current guess, is that when pod is freshly created, and receives a huge load immediately, the pod tries to open all 100 connections (it is visible in DB open sessions chart) which makes it too much at the beginning. What can be other reason? How to make sure that pod does operate at it's optimal performance from very beginning?
Final notes:
DB processor is not at its max (about 30%-40% usage under heaviest load).
most of the SQL queries and commands are relatively simple SELECT and INSERT
after initial part, queries are taking no more than 10-20ms each
I don't want to patch the problem with increasing number of connections in pool to more than 100, because after initial struggle pods operates properly with around 50 connections in use
I rather not have connection leak because in such case it will throw exceptions after normal load as well, after some time
I use scoped DbContext, which is disposed (thus connection is released to the pool) at the end of each request
EDIT 25-Nov-2020
My current guess is that new created pod is not receiving enough of either BANDWITH resource or CPU resource. This reasoning is supported by fact that even those requests which DOES NOT include querying DB were struggling.
Question: is it possible that new created pod is granted insufficient resources (CPU or network bandwidth) at the beginning?
EDIT 2 26-Nov-2020 (answering Arca Artem)
App runs on k8s cluster on AWS.
App connects to DB using standard ADO.NET connection pool (max 100 connections per pod).
I'm monitoring DB connections and DB CPU (all within reasonable limits). Hosts CPU utilization is also around 20-25%.
I thought that when pod start, and /health endpoint responds successfully (it checks DB connections, with simple SELECT probe) and also pod's max capacity is e.g. 200rps - then this pod is able to handle this traffic since very first moment after /health probe succeeded. However, from my logs I see that after '/health' probe succeed 4 times in a row under 20ms, then traffic starts coming in, few first seconds of pod handling traffic is taking more than 5s per request (sometimes even 40seconds per req).
I'm NOT monitoring hosts network.
At this point it's just a speculation on my part without knowing more about the code and architecture, but it's worth mentioning one thing that jumps out to me. The health check might not be using the normal code path that your other endpoints use, potentially leading to a false positive. If you have the option, use of a profiler could help you pin-point exactly when and how this happens. If not, we can take educated guesses where the problem might be. There could be a number of things at play here, and you may already be familiar with these, but I'm covering them for completeness sake:
First of all, it's worth bearing in mind that connections in Postgres are very expensive (to put it simply, it's because it's a fork on the database process) and your pods are consequently creating them in bulk when you scale your app all at once. A relatively considerable time is needed to set each one up and if you're doing them in bulk, it'll add up (how long is dependent on configuration, available resources..etc).
Assuming you're using ASP.NET Core (because you mentioned DbContext), the initial request(s) will take the penalty of initialising the whole stack (create min required connections in the pool, initialise ASP.NET stack, dependencies...etc). Again, this will all depend on how you structure your code and what your app is actually doing during initialisation. If your health endpoint is connecting to the DB directly (without utilising the connection pool), it would mean skipping the costly pool initialisation resulting in your initial requests to take the burden.
You're not observing the same behaviour when your load increases gradually possibly because usually these things are an interplay between different components and it's generally a non-linear function of available resources, code behaviour...etc. Specifically if it's just one new pod that spun up, it'll require much less number of connections than, say, 5 new pods spinning up, and Postgres would be able to satisfy it much quicker. Postgres is the shared resource here - creating 1 new connection would be significantly faster than creating 100 new connections (5 pods x 20 min connections in a pool) for all pods waiting on a new connection.
There are a few things you can do to speed up this process with config changes, using an external connection pooler like PgBouncer...etc but they won't be effective unless your health endpoint represents the actual state of your pods.
Again it's all based on assumptions but if you're not doing that already, try using the DbContext in your health endpoint to ensure the pool is initialised and ready to take connections. As someone mentioned in the comments, it's worth looking at other types of probes that might be better suited to implementing this pattern.
I found ultimate reason for the above issue. It was insufficient CPU resources assigned to pod.
Problem was hard to isolate because NewRelic APM CPU usage charts are calculated in different way than expected (please refer to NewRelic docs). The real pod CPU usage vs. CPU limit can be seen only in NewRelic kubernetes cluster viewer (probably it uses different algorithm to chart CPU usage there).
What is more, when pod starts up, it need a little more CPU at the beginning. On top of it, the pods were starting because of high traffic - and simply, there was no enough of CPU to handle these requests.

MongoDB TTL doesn't delete documents if under load

Use case
I am using MongoDB to persist messages from a message queue system (e. g. RabbitMQ / Kafka). Each message has a timestamp and based on that timestamp I want to expire the documents 1 hour afterwards. Therefore I've got a deleteAt field which is indexed and has set expireAfterSeconds: 0. Everything works fine, except if MongoDB is under heavy load.
We are inserting roughly 5-7k messages / second into a single replica set. The TTL Thread seems to be way slower than the rate of message coming in and thus the storage is quickly growing (which we want to avoid with TTLs).
To describe the behaviour more exactly, when I sort the messages by deleteAt ascending (oldest date first) I can see that it sometimes does not delete any of those messages for hours. Because of this observation I believe that the TTL thread sometimes is stuck or not active at all.
My question
What could I do to ensure that the TTL thread is not negatively impacted by the rate of messages coming in? According to our metrics our only bottleneck seems to be CPU, even though the SSD disk I/O is pretty high too.
Do I need to tune something (e. g. give MongoDB more threads for document deletion) so that the TTL thread can keep up with the write rate?
I believe I am facing a known bug as described in MongoDB's Jira Dashboard: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-19334
From https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/index-ttl/:
The background task that removes expired documents runs every 60 seconds. As a result, documents may remain in a collection during the period between the expiration of the document and the running of the background task.
Because the duration of the removal operation depends on the workload of your mongod instance, expired data may exist for some time beyond the 60 second period between runs of the background task.
I'm not aware of any way to tune that TTL thread, and I suspect you'll need to run your own cron to do batched deletes.
The other thing to look at might be what's taking up CPU and IO and see if there's any way of reducing that load.
You can create the index with "sparse", this should perform the clean up on a separate thread in the background.

mongodb write concern: all replica members dynamically?

Is it possible to set the WriteConcern to something like all which means the insert/update will only return when all "currently functional" (at time of the operation) replica members acknowledges the operation?
As
the 'majority' setting leave some members unaccounted for.
if we specify a numeric value, the insert/update may suspend indefinitely if we set the WriteConcern as "total number of members" and any replica members go down for any reason.
if we use tag set, as outlined in official docs, we still need to supply a numeric value to each tag and if we specify the numeric value as the total members count and any member goes down, the result would be same as 2nd point.
What we have in mind is if there is a setting forWriteConcern which is, dynamically, the total number of replica members at the time of insert/update.
Thanks in advance!
Is it possible to set the WriteConcern to something like all which means the insert/update will only return when all "currently functional" (at time of the operation) replica members acknowledges the operation?
There is a logical contradiction in suggesting your use case requires strong consistency except when that isn't possible. There are expected scenarios such as replication lag, maintenance, or failure (and subsequent recovery) where one or more of your replica set secondaries may be online but lagging behind the current primary.
If your use case requires strong consistency then you should always read from the primary instead of secondaries, and use a write concern of majority / replica_safe to ensure data has replicated sufficiently for high availability in the event of failover.
The default read preference is to direct reads to the primary for consistency. Secondaries in MongoDB replica sets are generally intended to support high availability rather than read scaling (with a few exceptions such as distribution across multiple data centres). For a lengthier explanation see: Can I use more replica nodes to scale?.
the 'majority' setting leave some members unaccounted for.
The majority write concern matches up with the majority required to elect a primary in the event of a replica set election. The replica set election mechanics include ensuring that a new primary is up-to-date with the most recent operation available in the replica set (of the nodes that are participating in the election).
if we specify a numeric value, the insert/update may suspend indefinitely if we set the WriteConcern as "total number of members" and any replica members go down for any reason.
That is the expected default behaviour, however there is a wtimeout write concern option which sets a time limit (in milliseconds) so a write will not block indefinitely waiting for an acknowledgement to be satisfied.
The caveats on using timeouts are very important, and provide even less certainty of outcome:
wtimeout causes write operations to return with an error after the specified limit, even if the required write concern will eventually succeed. When these write operations return, MongoDB does not undo successful data modifications performed before the write concern exceeded the wtimeout time limit.
The write concern timeout is not directly related to the current health of the replica set members (i.e. whether they online or offline and might be able to acknowledge a write concern) or the eventual outcome -- it's just a hard stop on how long your application will wait for a response before returning.
if we use tag set, as outlined in official docs, we still need to supply a numeric value to each tag and if we specify the numeric value as the total members count and any member goes down, the result would be same as 2nd point.
Correct.

should mongodb nodes in replicaset need to be time synchronized?

"MongoDB in Action" book says:
Imagine you issue a write to the primary node of a replica set. What happens next? First, the write is recorded and then added to the
primary’s oplog. Meanwhile, all sec- ondaries have their own oplogs
that replicate the primary’s oplog. So when a given secondary node is
ready to update itself, it does three things. First, it looks at the
time- stamp of the latest entry in its own oplog. Next, it queries the
primary’s oplog for all entries greater than that timestamp. Finally,
it adds each of those entries to its own oplog and applies the entries
to itself
So this means nodes must be time synchronized? because timestamps must be equal on all nodes.
In general, yes, it is a very good idea to have your hosts synchronized (NTP is the usual solution). In fact I have seen far worse issues caused than an out of sync oplog - different times on database hosts in a cluster should be considered a must.
This is actually mentioned on the Production Notes page in the docs:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Notes#ProductionNotes-Linux
See the note about minimizing clock skew.
Based on the writing you have provided, nodes are basing everything on the timestamp of the most recently received write, not their own clocks. However, the problem happens when the master is stepped down and a secondary becomes the primary. If the time is skewed greatly, it may cause replication to be delayed or other issues.