Batch requests and concurrent processing - node.js

I have a service in NodeJS which fetches user details from DB and sends that to another application via http. There can be millions of user records, so processing this 1 by 1 is very slow. I have implemented concurrent processing for this like this:
const userIds = [1,2,3....];
const users$ = from(this.getUsersFromDB(userIds));
const concurrency = 150;
users$.pipe(
switchMap((users) =>
from(users).pipe(
mergeMap((user) => from(this.publishUser(user)), concurrency),
toArray()
)
)
).subscribe(
(partialResults: any) => {
// Do something with partial results.
},
(err: any) => {
// Error
},
() => {
// done.
}
);
This works perfectly fine for thousands of user records, it's processing 150 user records concurrently at a time, pretty faster than publishing users 1 by 1.
But problem occurs when processing millions of user records, getting those from database is pretty slow as result set size also goes to GBs(more memory usage also).
I am looking for a solution to get user records from DB in batches, while keep on publishing those records concurrently in parallel.
I thinking of a solution like, maintain a queue(of size N) of user records fetched from DB, whenever queue size is less than N, fetch next N results from DB and add to this queue.
Then the current solution which I have, will keep on getting records from this queue and keep on processing those concurrently with defined concurrency. But I am not quite able to put this in code. Is there are way we can do this using RxJS?

I think your solution is the right one, i.e. using the concurrent parameter of mergeMap.
The point that I do not understand is why you are adding toArray at the end of the pipe.
toArray buffers all the notifications coming from upstream and will emit only when the upstream completes.
This means that, in your case, the subscribe does not process partial results but processes all of the results you have obtained executing publishUser for all users.
On the contrary, if you remove toArray and leave mergeMap with its concurrent parameter, what you will see is a continuous flow of results into the subscribe due to the concurrency of the process.
This is for what rxjs is concerned. Then you can look at the specific DB you are using to see if it supports batch reads. In which case you can create buffers of user ids with the bufferCount operator and query the db with such buffers.

Related

will I hit maximum writes per second per database if I make a document using Promise.all like this?

I am now developing an app. and I want to send a message to all my users inbox. the code is like this in my cloud functions.
const query = db.collection(`users`)
.where("lastActivity","<=",now)
.where("lastActivity",">=",last30Days)
const usersQuerySnapshot = await query.get()
const promises = []
usersQuerySnapshot.docs.forEach( userSnapshot => {
const user = userSnapshot.data()
const userID = user.userID
// set promise to create data in user inbox
const p1 = db.doc(`users/${userID}/inbox/${notificationID}`).set(notificationData)
promises.push(p1)
})
return await Promise.all(promises)
there is a limit in Firebase:
Maximum writes per second per database 10,000 (up to 10 MiB per
second)
say if I send a message to 25k users (create a document to 25K users),
how long the operations of that await Promise.all(promises) will take place ? I am worried that operation will take below 1 second, I don't know if it will hit that limit or not using this code. I am not sure about the operation rate of this
if I hit that limit, how to spread it out over time ? could you please give a clue ? sorry I am a newbie.
If you want to throttle the rate at which document writes happen, you should probably not blindly kick off very large batches of writes in a loop. While there is no guarantee how fast they will occur, it's possible that you could exceed the 10K/second/database limit (depending on how good the client's network connection is, and how fast Firestore responds in general). Over a mobile or web client, I doubt that you'll exceed the limit, but on a backend that's in the same region as your Firestore database, who knows - you would have to benchmark it.
Your client code could simply throttle itself with some simple logic that measures its progress.
If you have a lot of documents to write as fast as possible, and you don't want to throttle your client code, consider throttling them as individual items of work using a Cloud Tasks queue. The queue can be configured to manage the rate at which the queue of tasks will be executed. This will drastically increase the amount of work you have to do to implement all these writes, but it should always stay in a safe range.
You could use e.g. p-limit to reduce promise concurrency in the general case, or preferably use batched writes.

How to fix a race condition in node js + redis + mongodb web application

I am building a web application that will process many transactions a second. I am using an Express Server with Node Js. On the database side, I am using Redis to store attributes of a user which will fluctuate continuously based on stock prices. I am using MongoDB to store semi-permanent attributes like Order configuration, User configuration, etc.,
I am hitting a race condition when multiple orders placed by a user are being processed at the same time, but only one would have been eligible as a check on the Redis attribute which stores the margin would not have allowed both the transactions.
The other issue is my application logic interleaves Redis and MongoDB read + write calls. So how would I go about solving race condition across both the DBs
I am thinking of trying to WATCH and MULTI + EXEC on Redis in order to make sure only one transaction happens at a time for a given user.
Or I can set up a Queue on Node / Redis which will process Orders one by one. I am not sure which is the right approach. Or how to go about implementing it.
This is all pseudocode. Application logic is a lot more complex with multiple conditions.
I feel like my entire application logic is a critical section ( Which I think is a bad thing )
//The server receives a request from Client to place an Order
getAvailableMargin(user.username).then((margin) => { // REDIS call to fetch margin of user. This fluctuates a lot, so I store it in REDIS
if (margin > 0) {
const o = { // Prepare an order
user: user.username,
price: orderPrice,
symbol: symbol
}
const order = new Order(o);
order.save((err, o) => { // Create new Order in MongoDB
if (err) {
return next(err);
}
User.findByIdAndUpdate(user._id, {
$inc: {
balance: pl
}
}) // Update balance in MongoDB
decreaseMargin(user.username) // decrease margin of User in REDIS
);
}
});
Consider margin is 1 and with each new order margin decreases by 1.
Now if two requests are received simultaneously, then the margin in Redis will be 1 for both the requests thus causing a race condition. Also, two orders will now be open in MongoDB as a result of this. When in fact at the end of the first order, the margin should have become 0 and the second order should have been rejected.
Another issue is that we have now gone ahead and updated the balance for the User in MongoDB twice, one for each order.
The expectation is that one of the orders should not execute and a retry should happen by checking the new margin in Redis. And the balance of the user should also have updated only once.
Basically, would I need to implement a watch on both Redis and MongoDB
and somehow retry a transaction if any of the watched fields/docs change?
Is that even possible? Or is there a much simpler solution that I might be missing?

How to perform massive data uploads to firebase firestore

I have about ~300mb of data (~180k json objects) that gets updated once every 2-3 days.
This data is divided into three "collections", that I must keep up to date.
I decided to take the Node.JS way, but any solution in a language i know ( Java, Python) will be welcomed.
Whenever I perform a batch set using the node.JS firebase-admin client, not only it consumes an aberrant amount of ram ( about 4-6GB!), but it also tends to crash with errors that don't have a clear ( up to page 4 of google search without a meaningful answer ) reason.
My code is frankly simple, this is it:
var collection = db.collection("items");
var batch = db.batch();
array.forEach(item => {
var ref = collection.doc(item.id);
batch.set(ref, item);
});
batch.commit().then((res) => {
console.log("YAY",res);
});
I haven't found anywhere if there is a limit on the number of writes in a limited span of time (I understand doing 50-60k writes should be easy peasy with a backend the size of firebase), and also found that this can go up the ram train and have like 4-6GB of ram allocated.
I can confirm that when the errors are thrown, or the ram usage clogs my laptop, whatever happens first, I am still at less than 1-4% my daily usage quotas, so that is not the issue.

Concurrent requests overriding data in Redis

Scenarios: When ever a request comes I need to connect to Redis instance, open the connection, fetch the count, update the count and close the connect(For every request this is the flow).When the requests are coming in sequential order i.e. 1 user sending 100 requests one after the other then the count in Redis is 100.
Issue: Issue is when concurrent requests comes. i.e. 10 users sending 100 requests(each user 10 requests) concurrently then the count is not 100 its around 50.
Example: Assume count in Redis is 0. If 10 requests comes at the same time then 10 connections will be opened and all the 10 connections will fetch the count value as 0 and updated it to 1.
Analysis: I found out that, as the requests are coming concurrently, multiple connections are fetching the same count value and updating it because of it the count value is getting overridden. Can anyone suggest a best way to avoid this problem if you have already encountered this problem.
Here we are using Hapijs, Redis 3.0, ioredis
I would recommend queueing each task so that each request finishes before the next one starts.
Queue.js is a good library I have used before but you can check out others if you want.
Here is an example basically from the docs but adapted slightly for your use case:
var queue = require('../')
var q = queue()
var results = []
var rateLimited = false
q.push(function (cb) {
if(!rateLimited){
// get data and push into results
results.push('two')
}
cb()
})
q.start(function (err) {
if (err) throw err
console.log('all done:', results)
})
This is a very loose example as I just wrote it quickly and without seeing your code base but I hope you get the idea.

Node: Check a Firebase db and execute a function when an objects time matches the current time

Background
I have a Node and React based application. I'm using Firebase for my storage and database. In my application users can fill out a form where they upload an image and select a time for the image to be added to their website. I save each image update as an object in my Firebase database like so. Images are arranged in order of ascending update time.
user-name: {
images: [
{
src: 'image-src-url',
updateTime: 1503953587727
}
{
src: 'image-src-url',
updateTime: 1503958424838
}
]
}
Scale
My applications db could potentially get very large with a lot of users and images. I'd like to ensure scalability.
Issue
How do I check when a specific image objects time has been met then execute a function? (I do not need assistance on the actual function that is being run just the checking of the db for a specific time.)
Attempts
I've thought about doing a cron job using node-cron that checks the entire database every 60s (users can only specify the minute the image will update, not the seconds.) Then if it finds a matching updateTime and executes my function. My concern is at a large scale that cron job will take a while to search the db and potentially miss a time.
I've also thought about when the user schedules a new update then dynamically create a specific cron job for that time. I'm unsure how to accomplish this.
Any other methods that may work? Are my concerns about node-cron not valid?
There are two approaches I can think of:
Keep track of the last timestamp you processed
Keep the "things to process" in a queue
Keep track of the last timestamp you processed
When you process items, you use the current timestamp as the cut-off point for your query. Something like:
var now = Date.now();
var query = ref.orderByChild("updateTime").endAt(now)
Now make sure to store this now somewhere (i.e. in your database) so that you can re-use it next time to retrieve the next batch of items:
var previous = ... previous value of now
var now = Date.now();
var query = ref.orderByChild("updateTime").startAt(previous).endAt(now);
With this you're only processing a single slice at a time. The only tricky bit is that somebody might insert a new node with an updateTime that you've already processed. If this is a concern for your use-case, you can prevent them from doing so with a validation rule on updateTime:
".validate": "newData.val() >= root.child('lastProcessed').val()"
As you add more items to the database, you will indeed be querying more items. So there is a scalability limit to this approach, but this approach should work well for anything up to a few hundreds of thousands of nodes (I haven't tested in a while so ymmv).
For a few previous questions on list size:
Firebase Performance: How many children per node?
Firebase Scalability Limit
How many records / rows / nodes is alot in firebase?
Keep the "things to process" in a queue
An alternative approach is to keep a queue of items that still need to be processed. So the clients add the items that they want processed to the queue with an updateTime of when they want to processed. And your server picks the items from the queue, performs the necessary updates, and removes the item from the queue:
var now = Date.now();
var query = ref.orderByChild("updateTime").endAt(now)
query.once("value").then(function(snapshot) {
snapshot.forEach(function(child) {
// TODO: process the child node
// remove the child node from the queue
child.ref.remove();
});
})
The difference with the earlier approach is that a queue's stable state is going to be empty (or at least quite small), so your queries will run against a much smaller list. That's also why you won't need to keep track of the last timestamp you processed: any item in the queue up to now is eligible for processing.

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