Azure provides monitor to the incoming request to the Cosmos. When I am alone working on my Cosmos DB, ran a simple select vertex statement(eg., g.V('id')). Then I monitored the incoming request, it shows around 10. But for sure I know i'm the only person accessed. I also tried traversing through the graph in a single select query the Request count is huge (around 100).
Do anybody noticed the metrics? We are assuming the request code is huge for an hour in production cause the performance slowness. Is the metric is trustworthy to believe or how to find the incoming request to the cosmos?
Related
We have a solution utilizing a micro-service approach. One of our micro-service is responsible for pushing data to Cosmos. Our Cosmos database is using serverless provision having a 5,000 RU/s limit.
The data we are inserting into Cosmos looks like the below. There are 10 columns and we are pushing a batch containing 5,807 rows of this data.
Id
CompKey
Primary Id
Secondary Id
Type
DateTime
Item
Volume
Price
Fee
1
Veg_Buy
csd2354csd
dfg564dsfg55
Buy
30/08/21
Leek
10
0.75
5.00
2
Veg_Buy
sdf15s1dfd
sdf31sdf654v
Buy
30/08/21
Corn
5
0.48
3.00
We are retrieving data from multiple sources, normalizing it, and sending out the data as one bulk execution to Cosmos. The retrieval process happens every hour. We understand that we are spiking the Cosmos database once per hour with the data that has been retrieved and then stop sending data until the next retrieval cycle. So if this high peak is the problem, what remedies exist for such a scenario?
Can anyone shed some light on what we should/need to do to overcome this issue? Perhaps we are missing a setting when creating the Cosmos database or possibly this has something to do with partitioning?
You can mostly determine these things by looking at the metrics published in the Azure Portal. This doc is a good place to start, Monitor and debug with insights in Azure Cosmos DB.
In particular I would look at the section titled, Determine the throughput consumption by a partition key range
If you are not dealing with a hot partition key you may want to look at options to throttle your writes. This may include modifying your batch size and putting the write operations on a while..loop with a one second timer until RU/s consumed equals 5000 RU/s. You could also possibly look at doing queue-based load leveling and put writes on a queue in front of Cosmos and stream them in.
I have an API which allows other microservices to call on to check whether a particular product exists in the inventory. The API takes in only one parameter which is the ID of the product.
The API is served through API Gateway in Lambda and it simply queries against a Postgres RDS to check for the product ID. If it finds the product, it returns the information about the product in the response. If it doesn't, it just returns an empty response. The SQL is basically this:
SELECT * FROM inventory where expired = false and product_id = request.productId;
However, the problem is that many services are calling this particular API very heavily to check the existence of products. Not only that, the calls often come in bursts. I assume those services loop through a list of product IDs and check for their existence individually, hence the burst.
The number of concurrent calls on the API has resulted in it making many queries to the database. The rate can burst beyond 30 queries per sec and there can be a few hundred thousands of requests to fulfil. The queries are mostly the same, except for the product ID in the where clause. The column has been indexed and it takes an average of only 5-8ms to complete. Still, the connection to the database occasionally time out when the rate gets too high.
I'm using Sequelize as my ORM and the error I get when it time out is SequelizeConnectionAcquireTimeoutError. There is a good chance that the burst rate was too high and it max'ed out the pool too.
Some options I have considered:
Using a cache layer. But I have noticed that, most
of the time, 90% of the product IDs in the requests are not repeated.
This would mean that 90% of the time, it would be a cache miss and it
will still query against the database.
Auto scale up the database. But because the calls are bursty and I don't
know when they may come, the autoscaling won't complete in time to
avoid the time out. Moreover, the query is a very simple select statement and the CPU of the RDS instance hardly crosses 80% during the bursts. So I doubt scaling it would do much too.
What other techniques can I do to avoid the database from being hit hard when the API is getting burst calls which are mostly unique and difficult to cache?
Use cache in the boot time
You can load all necessary columns into an in-memory data storage (redis). Every update in database (cron job) will affect cached data.
Problems: memory overhead of updating cache
Limit db calls
Create a buffer for ids. Store n ids and then make one query for all of them. Or empty the buffer every m seconds!
Problems: client response time extra process for query result
Change your database
Use NoSql database for these data. According to this article and this one, I think choosing NoSql database is a better idea.
Problems: multiple data stores
Start with a covering index to handle your query. You might create an index like this for your table:
CREATE INDEX inv_lkup ON inventory (product_id, expired) INCLUDE (col, col, col);
Mention all the columns in your SELECT in the index, either in the main list of indexed columns or in the INCLUDE clause. Then the DBMS can satisfy your query completely from the index. It's faster.
You could start using AWS lambda throttling to handle this problem. But, for that to work the consumers of your API will need to retry when they get 429 responses. That might be super-inconvenient.
Sorry to say, you may need to stop using lambda. Ordinary web servers have good stuff in them to manage burst workload.
They have an incoming connection (TCP/IP listen) queue. Each new request coming in lands in that queue, where it waits until the server software accept the connection. When the server is busy requests wait in that queue. When there's a high load the requests wait for a bit longer in that queue. In nodejs's case, if you use clustering there's just one of these incoming connection queues, and all the processes in the cluster use it.
The server software you run (to handle your API) has a pool of connections to your DBMS. That pool has a maximum number of connections it it. As your server software handles each request, it awaits a connection from the pool. If no connection is immediately available the request-handling pauses until one is available, then handles it. This too smooths out the requests to the DBMS. (Be aware that each process in a nodejs cluster has its own pool.)
Paradoxically, a smaller DBMS connection pool can improve overall performance, by avoiding too many concurrent SELECTs (or other queries) on the DBMS.
This kind of server configuration can be scaled out: a load balancer will do. So will a server with more cores and more nodejs cluster processes. An elastic load balancer can also add new server VMs when necessary.
I am using Azure offline data sync framework to sync mobile app data to server. But I am seeing huge performance hit. Time taken to sync 2000 records of data is around 25 min. When I had further analysis, each http request is taking around 800ms during PushAsync.
Can someone help me how to send multiple records as part of http request during PushAsync operation?
I have a document db database on azure. I have a particularly heavy query that happens when I archive a user record and all of their data.
I was on the S1 plan and would get an exception that indicated I was hitting the limit of RU/s. The S1 plan has 250.
I decided to switch to the Standard plan that lets you set the RU/s and pay for it.
I set it to 500 RU/s.
I did the same query and went back and looked at the monitoring chart.
At the time I did this latest query test it said I did 226 requests and 10 were throttled.
Why is that? I set it to 500 RU/s. The query had failed, by the way.
Firstly, Requests != Request Units, so your 226 requests will at some point have caused more than 500 Request Units to be needed within one second.
The DocumentDb API will tell you how many RUs each request costs, so you can examine that client side to find out which request is causing the problem. From my experience, even a simple by-id request often cost at least a few RUs.
How you see that cost is dependent on which client-side SDK you use. In my code, I have added something to automatically log all requests that cost more than 10 RUs, just so I know and can take action.
It's also the case that the monitoring tools in the portal are quite inadequate and I know the team are working on that; you can only see the total RUs for every five minute interval, but you may try to use 600 RUs in one second and you can't really see that in the portal.
In your case, you may either have a single big query that just costs more than 500 RU - the logging will tell you. In that case, look at the generated SQL to see why, maybe even post it here.
Alternatively, it may be the cumulative effect of lots of small requests being fired off in a small time window. If you are doing 226 requests in response to one user action (and I don't know if you are) then you probably want to reconsider your design :)
Finally, you can retry failed requests. I'm not sure about other SDKs but the .Net SDK retries a request automatically 9 times before giving up (that might be another explanation for the 229 requests hitting the server).
If your chosen SDK doesn't retry, you can easily do it yourself; the server will return a specific status code (I think 429 but can't quite remember) along with an instruction on how long to wait before retrying.
Please examine the queries and update your question so we can help further.
When we migrated our apps to azure from rackspace, we saw almost 50% of http requests getting read timeouts.
We tried placing the client both inside and outside azure with the same results. The client in this case is also a server btw, so no geographic/browser issues either.
We even tried increasing the size of the box to ensure azure wasn't throttling. But even using D boxes for a single request, the result was the same.
Once we moved out apps out of azure they started functioning properly again.
Each query was done directly on an instance using a public ip, so no load balancer issues either.
Almost 50% of queries ran into this issue. The timeout was set to 15 minutes.
Region was US East 2
Having 50% of HTTP requests timing out is not normal behavior. This is why you need to analyze what is causing those timeouts by validating the requests are hitting your VM. For this, I would recommend you running a packet capture on your server and analyze response times, as well as look for high number of retransmissions; it is even better if you can take a simultaneous network trace on your clients machines so you can do TCP sequence number analysis and compare packets sent vs received.
If you are seeing high latencies in the packet capture or high number of retransmissions, it requires detailed analysis. I strongly suggest you to open a support incident so Microsoft support can help you investigate your issue further.