How to share memory between http requests in g-wan? - persistence

Lets say I have a g-wan server with c script, if a http request comes in and then another http request, I would like for both of these running scripts to be able to read and write from the same section of ram.
In other words, I wish to just have a simple RAM database, an array of data and any http request can read from this RAM database.
I mean for any HTTP request to this server, it could be from any client. I just want to be able to read or write from the same data in RAM.

You can use US_SERVER_DATA:
US_SERVER_DATA, // global pointer (for maintenance script)

Related

WireMock serve response from file and keep connection alive

We have a peculiar scenario we want to test.
We'll be consuming an HTTP stream which would stay open during certain time-frame. The stream consists of plain-text lines (CSV) and it's streamed using the chunked transfer encoding.
When we connect we expect to get all the data from, possibly, a file on the server side, and once that bulk is being served the connection stays alive, as it's possible that there would be more data transferred over the same connection.
Is it possible for Wiremock to serve everything from a file and keep the connection alive (doesn't send an empty chunk to signal the end of stream)?
The short answer is no.
While WireMock will keep connections alive by default per the HTTP 1.1 spec, it will always terminate the response once everything has been sent, either via the empty chunk or by setting Content-Length.
What you're trying to do (if I understand correctly) is stream out multiple payloads within the context of a single response, which WireMock doesn't have a means for doing.
A possible solution might be for you to concatenate all your response parts into a single file, although I suspect you've discounted that option for reasons not stated.
Another possibility would be to supply your own FileSource implementation to WireMock and thus provide your own InputStreamSource which would give you more control over how the underlying file(s) are streamed out in the response.

JMeter vs ReadyAPI SOAP API Performance Testing

Scenario: Read data from a CSV file with unknown number of records. Use the data to create Soap XML MSg and Post Method. Continue to do this until all the records have been read.
Problem: I used ReadyAPI to perform these actions and was able to achieve the intended TPS at server with whatever i have provided in VU's option. Tried with 150 vu's and observed constant load of 150 requests at the server. But when i try to do the same in JMeter, i was not able to achieve more than 70 TPS and the load isn't evenly distributed as well no matter how many threads i use. I am using a Thread Group, CSV DataSet Config, UserDefined Parameters to create unique request ID and JSR223 PreProcessor with Groovy Script as a child of HTTPRequest to remove empty xml tags.
Read some posts where it was mentioned that JMeter throughput will be stagnant based on servers response capability. But it's not in my case since i can generate 150TPS with ReadyAPI. Annual Licensing costs and Renewal costs associated with ReadyAPI is the Reason that i am looking for solution with JMeter.
Not only the server need to be able to respond fast enough, JMeter must be able to send requests fast enough as well.
Default JMeter configuration is suitable for tests development and debugging and creating some load (rather limited though), you need to properly tune your JMeter instance in order to fully utilize your machine resources so make sure to follow:
JMeter Best Practices
9 Easy Solutions for a JMeter Load Test “Out of Memory” Failure
If your single machine is not powerful enough to conduct the required load it's possible to run JMeter in distributed mode using as many load generators as needed in order to create the necessary number of virtual users/requests per second

Scala and playframework shared cache between nodes

I have a complex problem and I can't figure out which one is the best solution to solve it.
this is the scenario:
I have N servers under a single load balancer and a Database.
All the servers connect to the database
All the servers run the same identical application
I want to implement a Cache in order to decrease the response time and reduce to the minimum the HTTP calls Server -> Database
I implemented it and works like a charm on a single server...but I need to find a mechanism to update all the other caches in the other servers when the data is not valid anymore.
example:
I have server A and server B, both have their own cache.
At the first request from the outside, for example, get user information, replies server A.
his cache is empty so he needs to get the information from the database.
the second request goes to B, also here server B cache is empty, so he needs to get information from the database.
the third request, again on server A, now the data is in the cache, it replies immediately without database request.
the fourth request, on server B, is a write request (for example change user name), server B can make the changes on the database and update his own cache, invalidating the old user.
but server A still has the old invalid user.
So I need a mechanism for server B to communicate to server A (or N other servers) to invalidate/update the data in the cache.
whats is the best way to do this, in scala play framework?
Also, consider that in the future servers can be in geo-redundancy, so in different geographical locations, in a different network, served by a different ISP.
would be great also to update all the other caches when one user is loaded (one server request from database update all the servers caches), this way all the servers are ready for future request.
Hope I have been clear.
Thanks
Since you're using Play, which under the hood, already uses Akka, I suggest using Akka Cluster Sharding. With this, the instances of your Play service would form a cluster (including failure detection, etc.) at startup, and organize between themselves which instance owns a particular user's information.
So proceeding through your requests, the first request to GET /userinfo/:uid hits server A. The request handler hashes uid (e.g. with murmur3: consistent hashing is important) and resolves it to, e.g., shard 27. Since the instances started, this is the first time we've had a request involving a user in shard 27, so shard 27 is created and let's say it gets owned by server A. We send a message (e.g. GetUserInfoFor(uid)) to a new UserInfoActor which loads the required data from the DB, stores it in its state, and replies. The Play API handler receives the reply and generates a response to the HTTP request.
For the second request, it's for the same uid, but hits server B. The handler resolves it to shard 27 and its cluster sharding knows that A owns that shard, so it sends a message to the UserInfoActor on A for that uid which has the data in memory. It replies with the info and the Play API handler generates a response to the HTTP request from the reply.
In this way, all subsequent requests (e.g. the third, the same GET hitting server A) for the user info will not touch the DB, no matter which server they hit.
For the fourth request, which let's say is POST /userinfo/:uid and hits server B, the request handler again hashes the uid to shard 27 but this time, we send, e.g., an UpdateUserInfoFor(uid, newInfo) message to that UserInfoActor on server A. The actor receives the message, updates the DB, updates its in-memory user info and replies (either something simple like Done or the new info). The request handler generates a response from that reply.
This works really well: I've personally seen systems using cluster sharding keep terabytes in memory and operate with consistent single-digit millisecond latency for streaming analytics with interactive queries. Servers crash, and the actors running on the servers get rebalanced to surviving instances.
It's important to note that anything matching your requirements is a distributed system and you're requiring strong consistency, i.e. you're requiring that it be unavailable under a network partition (if B is unable to communicate an update to A, it has no choice but to fail the request). Once you start talking about geo-redundancy and multiple ISPs, you're going to see partitions pretty regularly. The only way to get availability under a network partition is to relax the consistency demand and accept that sometimes the GET will not incorporate the latest PUT/POST/DELETE.
This is probably not something that you want to build yourself. But there are plenty of distributed caches out there that you can use, such as Ehcache or InfiniSpan. I suggest you look into one of those two.

Push data to client, how to handle slow clients?

In a push model, where server pushes data to clients, how does one handle clients with low or variable bandwidth?
For example i receive data from a producer and send the data to my clients (push). What if one of my clients decides to download a linux iso, the available bandwidth to this client becomes too little to download my data.
Now when my producers produces data and the server pushes it to the client, all clients will have to wait until all clients have downloaded the data. This is a problem when there is one or more slow clients with little bandwidth.
I can cache the data to be send for every client, but because the data size is big this isn't really an option (lots of clients * data size = huge memory requirements).
How is this generally solved? No need for code, just a few thoughts/ideas are already more then welcome.
Now when my producers produces data and the server pushes it to the
client, all clients will have to wait until all clients have
downloaded the data.
The above shouldn't be the case -- your clients should be able to download asynchronously from each other, with each client maintaining its own independent download state. That is, client A should never have to wait for client B to finish, and vice versa.
I can cache the data to be send for every client, but because the data
size is big this isn't really an option (lots of clients * data size =
huge memory requirements).
As Warren said in his answer, this problem can be reduced by keeping only one copy of the data rather than one copy per client. Reference-counting (e.g. via shared_ptr, if you are using C++, or something equivalent in another language) is an easy way to make sure that the shared data is deleted only when all clients are done downloading it. You can make the sharing more fine-grained, if necessary, by breaking up the data into chunks (e.g. instead of all clients holding a reference to a single 800MB linux iso, you could break it up into 800 1MB chunks, so that you can start removing the earlier chunks from memory as soon as all clients have downloaded them, instead of having to hold the entire 800MB of data in memory until every client has downloaded the entire thing)
Of course, that sort of optimization only gets you so far -- e.g. if two clients each request a different 800MB file, then you're liable to end up with 1.6GB of RAM usage for caching, unless you come up with a more clever solution.
Here are some possible approaches you could try (from less complex to more complex). You could try any of these either separately or in combination:
Monitor how much each client's "backlog" is -- that is, keep a count of the amount of data you have cached waiting to send to that client. Also keep track of the number of bytes of cached data your server is currently holding; if that number gets too high, force-disconnect the client with the largest backlog, in order to free up memory. (this doesn't result in a good user experience for the client, of course; but if the client has a buggy or slow connection he was unlikely to have a good user experience anyway. It does keep your server from crashing or swapping itself to death because a single client has a bad connection)
Keep track of how much data your server has cached and waiting to send out. If the amount of data you have cached is too large (for some appropriate value of "too large"), temporarily stop reading from the socket(s) that are pushing the data out to you (or if you are generating your data internally, temporarily stop generating it). Once the amount of cached data gets down to an acceptable level again, you can resume receiving (or generating) more data to push.
(this may or may not be applicable to your use-case) Revise your data model so that instead of being communications-oriented, it becomes state-oriented. For example, if your goal is to update the clients' state to match the state of the data-source, and you can organize the data-source's state into a set of key/value pairs, then you can require that the data-source include a key with each piece of data it sends. Whenever a key/value pair is received from the data-source, simply place that key-value pair into a map (or hash table or some other key/value oriented data structure) for each client (again, used shared_ptr's or similar here to keep memory usage reasonable). Whenever a given client has drained its queue of outgoing TCP data, remove the oldest item from that client's key/value map, convert it into TCP bytes to send, and add them to the outgoing-TCP-data queue. Repeat as necessary. The advantage of this is that "obsolete" values for a given key are automatically dropped inside the server and therefore never need to be sent to the slow clients; rather the slow clients will only ever get the "latest" value for that given key. The beneficial consequence of that is that a given client's maximum "backlog" will be limited by the number of keys in the state-model, regardless of how slow or intermittent the client's bandwidth is. Thus a slow client might see fewer updates (per second/minute/hour), but the updates it does see will still be as recent as possible given its bandwidth.
Cache the data once only, and have each client handler keep track of where it is in the download, all using the same cache. Once all clients have all the data, the cached data can be deleted.

Sending large files with Spray

I know very similar questions have been asked before. But I don't think the solutions I found on google/stackoverflow are suitable for me.
I started to write some web services with Scala/Spray, and it seems the best way to send large files without consuming large amouns of memory is using the stream marshalling. This way Spray will send http chunks. Two questions:
Is it possible to send the file without using HTTP chunks and without reading the entire file into memory?
AFAIK akka.io only process one write at a time, meaning it can buffer one write until it has been passed on to the O/S kernel in full. Would it be possible to tell Spray, for each HTTP response, the length of the content? Thereafter Spray would ask for new data (through akka messages) untill the entire content length is completed. Eg, I indicate my content length is 100 bytes. Spray sends a message asking for data to my actor, I provide 50 bytes. Once this data is passed on to the O/S, spray sends another message asking for new data. I provide the remaining 50 bytes... the response is completed then.
Is it possible to send the file without using HTTP chunks [on the wire]
Yes, you need to enable chunkless streaming. See http://spray.io/documentation/1.2.4/spray-routing/advanced-topics/response-streaming/
Chunkless streaming works regardless whether you use the Stream marshaller or provide the response as MessageChunks yourself. See the below example.
without reading the entire file into memory
Yes, that should work if you supply data as a Stream[Array[Byte]] or Stream[ByteString].
[...] Thereafter Spray would ask for new data [...]
That's actually almost like it already works: If you manually provide the chunks you can request a custom Ack message that will be delivered back to you when the spray-can layer is able to process the next part. See this example for how to stream from a spray route.
I indicate my content length is 100 bytes
A note upfront: In HTTP you don't strictly need to specify a content-length for responses because a response body can be delimited by closing the connection which is what spray does if chunkless streaming is enable. However, if you don't want to close the connection (because you would lose this persistent connection) you can now specify an explicit Content-Length header in your ChunkedResponseStart message (see #802) which will prevent the closing of the connection.