Any suggestions about how to publish a huge amount of messages within one round of request / response? - node.js

Question

If I publish 50K messages using Promise.all like below:
const pubsub = new PubSub({ projectId: PUBSUB_PROJECT_ID });
const topic = pubsub.topic(topicName, {
batching: {
maxMessages: 1000,
maxMilliseconds: 100,
},
});
const n = 50 * 1000;
const dataBufs: Buffer[] = [];
for (let i = 0; i < n; i++) {
const data = `message payload ${i}`;
const dataBuffer = Buffer.from(data);
dataBufs.push(dataBuffer);
}
const tasks = dataBufs.map((d, idx) =>
topic.publish(d).then((messageId) => {
console.log(`[${new Date().toISOString()}] Message ${messageId} published. index: ${idx}`);
})
);
// publish messages concurrencly
await Promise.all(tasks);
// send response to front-end
res.json(data);
I will hit this issue: pubsub-emulator throw error and publisher throw "Retry total timeout exceeded before any response was received" when publish 50k messages
If I use for loop and async/await. The issue is gone.
const n = 50 * 1000;
for (let i = 0; i < n; i++) {
const data = `message payload ${i}`;
const dataBuffer = Buffer.from(data);
const messageId = await topic.publish(dataBuffer)
console.log(`[${new Date().toISOString()}] Message ${messageId} published. index: ${i}`)
}
// some logic ...
// send response to front-end
res.json(data);
But it will block the execution of subsequent logic because of async/await until all messages have been published. It takes a long time to post 50k messages.
Any suggestions about how to publish a huge amount of messages(about 50k) without blocking the execution of subsequent logic? Do I need to use child_process or some queue like bull to publish the huge amount of messages in the background without blocking request/response workflow of the API? This means I need to respond to the front-end as soon as possible, the 50k messages should be the background tasks.
It seems there is a memory queue inside #google/pubsub library. I am not sure if I should use another queue like bull again.

Answer 1

The time it will take to publish large amounts of data depends on a lot of factors:
Message size. The larger the messages, the longer it takes to send them.
Network capacity (both of the connection between wherever the publisher is running and Google Cloud and, if relevant, of the virtual machine itself). This puts an upper bound on the amount of data that can be transmitted. It is not atypical to see smaller virtual machines with limits in the 40MB/s range. Note that if you are testing via Wifi, the limits could be even lower than this.
Number of threads and number of CPU cores. When having to run a lot of asynchronous callbacks, the ability to schedule them to run can be limited by the parallel capacity of the machine or runtime environment.
Typically, it is not good to try to send 50,000 publishes simultaneously from one instance of a publisher. It is likely that the above factors will cause the client to get overloaded and result in deadline exceeded errors. The best way to prevent this is to limit the number of messages that can be outstanding for publish at one time. Some of the libraries like Java support this natively. The Node.js library does not yet support this feature, but likely will in the future.
In the meantime, you'd want to keep a counter of the number of messages outstanding and limit it to whatever the client seems to be able to handle. Start with 1000 and work up or down from there based on the results. A semaphore would be a pretty standard way to achieve this behavior. In your case the code would look something like this:
var sem = require('semaphore')(1000);
var publishes = []
const tasks = dataBufs.map((d, idx) =>
sem.take(function() => {
publishes.push(topic.publish(d).then((messageId) => {
console.log(`[${new Date().toISOString()}] Message ${messageId} published. index: ${idx}`);
sem.leave();
}));
})
);
// Await the start of publishing all messages
await Promise.all(tasks);
// Await the actual publishes
await Promise.all(publishes);