I'm using a very simple express server, with a PUT and GET routes on an Ubuntu machine, but if I use several clients (around 8) doing requests at the same time it very easily gets flooded and starts to return connect EADDRNOTAVAIL errors. I have found no way to avoid this other than reducing the number of requests per client, but is there a way to throttle answers on the server so that instead of returning error it queues petitions and serves them in due time?
Maybe it's better to check whether there are answers to requests on the client and not insert new ones if they have not been served? Client is here
Queuing seems to be wrong, you should first check your current ulimit (every connection needs a handle).
To solve your problem, just change the ulimit.
Related
I'm writing an API that returns an array of redirects for any given page:
router.post('/trace', function(req,res){
if(!req.body.link)
return res.status(405).send(""); //error: no link provided!
console.log("\tapi/trace()", req.body.link);
var redirects = [];
function exit(goodbye){
if(goodbye)
console.log(goodbye);
res.status(200).send(JSON.stringify(redirects)); //end
}
function getRedirect(link){
request({ url: link, followRedirect: false }, function (err, response, body) {
if(err)
exit(err);
else if(response.headers.location){
redirects.push(response.headers.location);
getRedirect(response.headers.location);
}
else
exit(); //all done!
});
}
getRedirect(req.body.link);
});
and here is the corresponding browser request:
$.post('/api/trace', { link: l }, cb);
a page will make about 1000 post request very quickly and then waits a very long time to get each request back.
The problem is the response to the nth request is very slow. individual request takes about half a second, but as best I cant tell the express server is processing each link sequentially. I want the server to make all the requests and respond as it receives a response.
Am I correct in assuming express POST router is running processes sequentially? How do I get it to blast all requests and pass the responses as it gets them?
My question is why is it so slow / is POST an async process on a "out of the box" express server?
You may be surprised to find out that this is probably first a browser issue, not a node.js issue.
A browser will have a max number of simultaneous requests it will allow your Javascript ajax to make to same host which will vary slightly from one browser to the next, but is around 6. So, if you're making 1000 requests, then only around 6 are being sent at at time. The rest go in a queue in the browser waiting for prior requests to finish. So, your node server likely isn't getting 1000 simultaneous requests. You should be able to confirm this by logging incoming requests in your node.js app. You will probably see a long delay before it receives the 1000th request (because it's queued by the browser).
Here's a run-down of how many simultanous requests to a given host each of the browser supported (as of a couple years ago): Max parallel http connections in a browser?.
My first recommendation would be to package up an array of requests to make from the client to the server (perhaps 50 at a time) and then send that in one request. That will give your node.js server plenty to chew on and won't run afoul of the browser's connection limit to the same host.
As for the node.js server, it depends a lot on what you're doing. If most of what you're doing in the node.js server is just networking and not a lot of processing that requires CPU cycles, then node.js is very efficient at handling lots and lots of simultaneous requests. If you start engaging a bunch of CPU (processing or preparing results), then you make benefit from either adding worker processes or using node.js clustering. In your case, you may want to use worker processes. You can examine your CPU load when your node.js server is processing a bunch of work and see if the one CPU that node.js is using is anywhere near 100% or not. If it isn't, then you don't need more node.js processes. If it is, then you do need to spread the work over more node.js processes to go faster.
In your specific case, it looks like you're really only doing networking to collect 302 redirect responses. Your single node.js process should be able to handle a lot of those requests very efficiently so probably the issue is just that your client is being throttled by the browser.
If you want to send a lot of requests to the server (so it can get to work on as many as feasible), but want to get results back immediately as they become available, that's a little more work.
One scheme that could work is to open a webSocket or socket.io connection. You can then send a giant array of URLs that you want the server to check for you in one message over the socket.io connection. Then, as the server gets a result, it can send back each individual result (tagged with the URL that it corresponds to). That way, you can somewhat get the best of both worlds with the server crunching on a long list of URLs, but able to send back individual responses as soon as it gets them.
Note, you will probably find that there is an upper limit to how many outbound http requests you may want to run at the same time from your node.js server too. While modern versions of node.js don't throttle you like the browser does, you probably also don't want your node.js server attempting to run 10,000 simultaneous requests because you may exhaust some sort of network resource pool. So, once you get past the client bottleneck, you will want to test your server at different levels of simultaneous requests open to see where it performs best. This is both to optimize its performance, but also to protect your server against attempting to overextend its use of networking or memory resources and get into error conditions.
Background
We have a server that has socket.io 2.0.4. This server receives petitions from a stress script that simulates clients using socket.io-client 2.0.4.
The scrip simulates the creation of clients ( each client with its own socket ) that sends a petition and immediately dies after, using socket.disconnect();
Problem
During the first few of seconds all goes well. But every test reaches a point in which the script starts spitting out the following error:
connect_error: Error: websocket error
This means that the clients my script is creating are not connecting to the server because they are unable to connect.
This script creates 7 clients per second ( spaced evenly throughout the second ), each client makes 1 petition and then dies.
Research
At first I thought there was an issue with file descriptors and limits imposed by UNIX, since the server is in a Debian machine:
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io/issues/1393
After following these suggestions, the issue remained however.
Then I though maybe my test script was not connecting correctly, so I changed the connection options as in this discussion:
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-client/issues/1097
Still, to no avail.
What could be wrong?
I see the machine's CPU's are constantly at 100% so I guess I am pounding the server with requests.
But if I am not mistaken, the server should simply accept more requests and process them when possible.
Questions
Is there a limit to the amount of connections a socket.io server can handle?
When making such stress tests one needs to be aware of protections and gate keepers.
In our case, our stack was deployed in AWS. So first, the AWS load balancers started blocking us because they thought the system was being DDOSed.
Then, the Debian system was getting flooded and it started refusing connections with SYN_FLOOD.
But after fixing that we were still having the error. Turns out we had to increase TCP connection's buffer and how TCP connections were being handled in the kernel.
Now it accepts all connections, but I wish no one the suffering we went through to find it out...
We are working with the following stack:
A node express middleware running on Nginx is communicating with an Apache, which proxies the requests to Tomcat, that are located on another server. Now, when requesting an operation that takes more than 15 seconds to complete, another identical request will be sent. There is obviously a 15-second retry policy somewhere.
So far, I have been unable to detect exactly who is doing this and my Google searches have also been fruitless. So, my question is if anyone has experience with something like this and could it be Node, Nginx or Apache that is sending the second request.
Any suggestions on where the double requests are coming from and what property I need to adjust to turn them off would be greatly appreciated.
The solution was to set the socket timeout property in apache's jk_mod to 0.
My task is to send as much as possible GET requests using standart nodejs http module (with http.get) to a remote server (for the data import, not DDOS :) ) But after a certain number of requests sending stops stop or go on very slowly.
I have already set the value http.globalAgent.maxSockets = Infinity, req.setNoDelay(true); and req.setSocketKeepAlive(true);. Also i make the requests in the async queue with 10-1000 concurrency and it affects the number of connections sent to a stop. I increased ulimit -n to a maximum.
Does somebody have advice or similar experience? Maybe I do something wrong?
See my appropriate node issues on GitHub and Stackoverflow
Maybe my workaround described there works for you too. Instead of modifying the globalAgent I disabled it.
We have a node.js server which implements a REST API as a proxy to a central server which has a slightly different, and unfortunately asymmetric REST API.
Our client, which runs in various browsers, asks the node server to get the tasks from the central server. The node server gets a list of all the task ids from the central one and returns them to the client. The client then makes two REST API calls per id through the proxy.
As far as I can tell, this stuff is all done asynchronously. In the console log, it looks like this when I start the client:
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/tasks/*: /api/v1/tasks/
This takes a couple seconds to get the list from the central server. As soon as it gets the response, the server barfs this out very quickly:
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/tasks/id/:id :/api/v1/tasks/id/438
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/workflow/id/:id :/api/v1/workflow/id/438
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/tasks/id/:id :/api/v1/tasks/id/439
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/workflow/id/:id :/api/v1/workflow/id/439
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/tasks/id/:id :/api/v1/tasks/id/441
Requested GET URL under /api/v1/workflow/id/:id :/api/v1/workflow/id/441
Then, each time a pair of these requests gets a result from the central server, another two lines is barfed out very quickly.
So it seems our node.js server is only willing to have six requests out at a time.
There are no TCP connection limits imposed by Node itself. (The whole point is that it's highly concurrent and can handle thousands of simultaneous connections.) Your OS may limit TCP connections.
It's more likely that you're either hitting some kind of limitation of your backend server, or you're hitting the builtin HTTP library's connection limit, but it's hard to say without more details about that server or your Node implementation.
Node's built-in HTTP library (and obviously any libraries built on top of it, which are most) maintains a connection pool (via the Agent class) so that it can utilize HTTP keep-alives. This helps increase performance when you're running many requests to the same server: rather than opening a TCP connection, making a HTTP request, getting a response, closing the TCP connection, and repeating; new requests can be issued on reused TCP connections.
In node 0.10 and earlier, the HTTP Agent will only open 5 simultaneous connections to a single host by default. You can change this easily: (assuming you've required the HTTP module as http)
http.globalAgent.maxSockets = 20; // or whatever
node 0.12 sets the default maxSockets to Infinity.
You may want to keep some kind of connection limit in place. You don't want to completely overwhelm your backend server with hundreds of HTTP requests under a second – performance will most likely be worse than if you just let the Agent's connection pool do its thing, throttling requests so as to not overload your server. Your best bet will be to run some experiments to see what the optimal number of concurrent requests is in your situation.
However, if you really don't want connection pooling, you can simply bypass the pool entirely – sent agent to false in the request options:
http.get({host:'localhost', port:80, path:'/', agent:false}, callback);
In this case, there will be absolutely no limit on concurrent HTTP requests.
It's the limit on number of concurrent connections in the browser:
How many concurrent AJAX (XmlHttpRequest) requests are allowed in popular browsers?
I have upvoted the other answers, as they helped me diagnose the problem. The clue was that node's socket limit was 5, and I was getting 6 at a time. 6 is the limit in Chrome, which is what I was using to test the server.
How are you getting data from the central server? "Node does not limit connections" is not entirely accurate when making HTTP requests with the http module. Client requests made in this way use the http.globalAgent instance of http.Agent, and each http.Agent has a setting called maxSockets which determines how many sockets the agent can have open to any given host; this defaults to 5.
So, if you're using http.request or http.get (or a library that relies on those methods) to get data from your central server, you might try changing the value of http.globalAgent.maxSockets (or modify that setting on whatever instance of http.Agent you're using).
See:
http.Agent documentation
agent.maxSockets documentation
http.globalAgent documentation
Options you can pass to http.request, including an agent parameter to specify your own agent
Node js can handle thousands of incoming requests - yes!
But when it comes down to ougoing requests every request has to deal with a dns lookup and dns lookup's, disk reads etc are handled by the libuv which is programmed in C++. The default value of threads for each node process is 4x threads.
If all 4x threads are busy with https requests ( dns lookup's ) other requests will be queued. That is why no matter how brilliant your code might be : you sometimes get 6 or sometimes less concurrent outgoing requests per second completed.
Learn about dns cache to reduce the amount of dns look up's and increase libuv size. If you use PM2 to manage your node processes they do have a well documentation on their side on environment variables and how to inject them. What you are looking for is the environment variable UV_THREADPOOL_SIZE = 4
You can set the value anywhere between 1 or max limit of 1024. But keep in mind libuv limit of 1024 is across all event loops.
I have seen the same problem in my server. It was only processing 4 requests.
As explained already from 0.12 maxsockets defaults to infinity. That easily overwhelms the sever. Limiting the requests to say 10 by
http.globalAgent.maxSockets = 20;
solved my problem.
Are you sure it just returns the results to the client? Node processes everything in one thread. So if you do some fancy response parsing or anything else which doesn't yield, then it would block all your requests.