TL;DR: To address slow uploading issue for Unicorn, either use Nginx or Rainbows! with EventMachine (until something could replace EventMachine).
We take this very simple application which parses POST body as an example:
run lambda{ |env|
now = Time.now
Rack::Request.new(env).POST
diff = (Time.now - now).to_f.to_s
[200, {'Content-Length' => (diff.size + 1).to_s}, ["#{diff}\n"]]
}You can simply push this repository to Heroku to run it.
This script would do a very simple DoS attack against applications
running with Unicorn and parsing POST body on Heroku Cedar stack.
(Make sure you have celluloid-io installed and patched with this
pull request
before running this script: gem install celluloid-io)
./dos-attack.rb your-app.herokuapp.com
It would make 50 concurrent requests with 1M payload to the host slowly, and 50 concurrent fast requests which should be responded immediately. With Unicorn running, you can see the application is blocked by the slow uploading, making the server respond slowly to other fast clients.
Switching to Rainbows! with EventMachine would solve this issue. Any fast clients could get the response fast, and let slow clients get responses slowly as we would expect.
Edit Procfile with sed s/unicorn/rainbows/g and you're done. See
rainbows branch if you don't get it.
Fast Request: Server: 0.006072 Client: 0.556211
Fast Request: Server: 0.020797 Client: 0.549858
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 25.163803
Slow Upload: Server: 24.598561 Client: 25.164132
Fast Request: Server: 0.000017 Client: 27.133608
Slow Upload: Server: 1.943602 Client: 27.129733
Slow Upload: Server: 2.835424 Client: 29.965330
Slow Upload: Server: 29.452087 Client: 29.992707
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.519966
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.522115
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.504414
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.500008
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.548768
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.544840
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.554672
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.549935
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.553387
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.537094
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.543002
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.536527
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.564070
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.549337
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.543024
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.570357
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.542086
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.547023
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.564763
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.569082
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.553861
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.573553
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.563701
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.593784
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.607062
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.601997
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.932576
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 30.977656
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.550038
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.550361
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.572741
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.554272
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.551809
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.565538
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.573551
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.568841
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.559254
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.581731
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.583682
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.679816
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 31.700620
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 33.447381
Slow Upload: Server: 34.794628 Client: 35.309662
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 36.603441
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 36.600524
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 36.596304
Fast Request: Server: 0.000000 Client: 36.587325
Slow Upload: Server: 6.704092 Client: 36.667152
Slow Upload: Server: 1.325843 Client: 37.970003
Slow Upload: Server: 37.814853 Client: 38.369247
Slow Upload: Server: 0.092056 Client: 38.462792
Slow Upload: Server: 0.104226 Client: 38.560897
Slow Upload: Server: 0.095220 Client: 38.646953
Slow Upload: Server: 0.126940 Client: 38.790906
Slow Upload: Server: 0.201364 Client: 38.990417
Slow Upload: Server: 1.685444 Client: 39.712930
Slow Upload: Server: 0.223756 Client: 39.914301
Slow Upload: Server: 11.399644 Client: 41.397796
Slow Upload: Server: 1.926276 Client: 41.838108
Slow Upload: Server: 0.235048 Client: 42.069869
Slow Upload: Server: 0.059699 Client: 42.120883
Slow Upload: Server: 0.118339 Client: 42.234195
Slow Upload: Server: 0.154221 Client: 42.386302
Slow Upload: Server: 0.317082 Client: 42.706941
Slow Upload: Server: 1.414012 Client: 42.792741
Slow Upload: Server: 0.189865 Client: 42.886127
Slow Upload: Server: 0.235988 Client: 43.044869
Slow Upload: Server: 0.174253 Client: 43.073607
Slow Upload: Server: 0.058848 Client: 43.152562
Slow Upload: Server: 0.120868 Client: 43.143361
Slow Upload: Server: 0.067199 Client: 43.189365
Slow Upload: Server: 0.115995 Client: 43.253345
Slow Upload: Server: 0.107812 Client: 43.358437
Slow Upload: Server: 0.276069 Client: 43.478449
Slow Upload: Server: 0.112423 Client: 43.503993
Slow Upload: Server: 0.161059 Client: 43.651190
Slow Upload: Server: 0.183011 Client: 43.666212
Slow Upload: Server: 0.057671 Client: 43.713245
Slow Upload: Server: 0.069114 Client: 43.716193
Slow Upload: Server: 4.765837 Client: 43.760144
Slow Upload: Server: 0.062533 Client: 43.758856
Slow Upload: Server: 0.085408 Client: 43.813679
Slow Upload: Server: 0.108062 Client: 43.844413
Slow Upload: Server: 0.090623 Client: 43.857531
Slow Upload: Server: 0.111162 Client: 43.932428
Slow Upload: Server: 0.070169 Client: 43.936519
Slow Upload: Server: 0.085543 Client: 43.925756
Slow Upload: Server: 0.057380 Client: 44.002495
Slow Upload: Server: 0.071675 Client: 44.009978
Slow Upload: Server: 0.177558 Client: 44.167061
Slow Upload: Server: 9.624512 Client: 44.993778
Slow Upload: Server: 2.017310 Client: 45.960921
Fast Request: Server: 0.000021 Client: 0.480073
Fast Request: Server: 0.000017 Client: 0.465383
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.477394
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.464261
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.482804
Fast Request: Server: 0.000018 Client: 0.484193
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.462815
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.486749
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.478719
Fast Request: Server: 0.000015 Client: 0.473328
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.472794
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.476616
Fast Request: Server: 0.000010 Client: 0.488184
Fast Request: Server: 0.000010 Client: 0.473193
Fast Request: Server: 0.000036 Client: 0.474039
Fast Request: Server: 0.000024 Client: 0.514449
Fast Request: Server: 0.000024 Client: 0.484744
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.523951
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.490312
Fast Request: Server: 0.000022 Client: 0.493404
Fast Request: Server: 0.000018 Client: 0.527190
Fast Request: Server: 0.000010 Client: 0.517327
Fast Request: Server: 0.000011 Client: 0.525474
Fast Request: Server: 0.000007 Client: 0.508925
Fast Request: Server: 0.000012 Client: 0.501849
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.539673
Fast Request: Server: 0.000008 Client: 0.540821
Fast Request: Server: 0.000011 Client: 0.523010
Fast Request: Server: 0.000015 Client: 0.543564
Fast Request: Server: 0.000011 Client: 0.548428
Fast Request: Server: 0.000011 Client: 0.515838
Fast Request: Server: 0.000016 Client: 0.536290
Fast Request: Server: 0.000018 Client: 0.557783
Fast Request: Server: 0.000024 Client: 0.545607
Fast Request: Server: 0.000017 Client: 0.555119
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.548268
Fast Request: Server: 0.000020 Client: 0.573716
Fast Request: Server: 0.000019 Client: 0.566002
Fast Request: Server: 0.000014 Client: 0.550562
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.562170
Fast Request: Server: 0.000009 Client: 0.559568
Fast Request: Server: 0.000018 Client: 0.588529
Fast Request: Server: 0.000022 Client: 0.814884
Fast Request: Server: 0.000021 Client: 1.584281
Fast Request: Server: 0.000022 Client: 1.594519
Fast Request: Server: 0.000015 Client: 1.574818
Fast Request: Server: 0.000021 Client: 1.595932
Fast Request: Server: 0.000039 Client: 1.601574
Fast Request: Server: 0.000010 Client: 1.600343
Fast Request: Server: 0.000023 Client: 1.605428
Slow Upload: Server: 0.008801 Client: 27.914253
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014987 Client: 29.511524
Slow Upload: Server: 0.006587 Client: 30.716685
Slow Upload: Server: 0.006357 Client: 32.182543
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012129 Client: 32.228273
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005411 Client: 32.578170
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012144 Client: 32.782130
Slow Upload: Server: 0.011037 Client: 33.758409
Slow Upload: Server: 0.042762 Client: 33.881185
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013430 Client: 34.188827
Slow Upload: Server: 0.101143 Client: 34.735648
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005882 Client: 35.210380
Slow Upload: Server: 0.007360 Client: 35.255416
Slow Upload: Server: 0.007015 Client: 35.340739
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014481 Client: 35.541253
Slow Upload: Server: 0.017011 Client: 35.778469
Slow Upload: Server: 0.011493 Client: 35.795213
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012398 Client: 36.225711
Slow Upload: Server: 0.015291 Client: 36.565516
Slow Upload: Server: 0.011651 Client: 36.574548
Slow Upload: Server: 0.006613 Client: 36.984746
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014658 Client: 36.986202
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013559 Client: 38.448018
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013918 Client: 38.857900
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014629 Client: 38.868641
Slow Upload: Server: 0.004886 Client: 38.873898
Slow Upload: Server: 0.015431 Client: 38.960264
Slow Upload: Server: 0.007992 Client: 39.120231
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013109 Client: 39.334079
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005085 Client: 39.513112
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013155 Client: 39.582475
Slow Upload: Server: 0.017156 Client: 39.945550
Slow Upload: Server: 0.015036 Client: 39.934605
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014068 Client: 40.067253
Slow Upload: Server: 0.004899 Client: 40.242732
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005942 Client: 40.285879
Slow Upload: Server: 0.006314 Client: 40.411893
Slow Upload: Server: 0.014326 Client: 41.170308
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012932 Client: 41.458996
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012344 Client: 41.573364
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005248 Client: 42.179275
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005940 Client: 42.312414
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005517 Client: 42.520032
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013394 Client: 42.680050
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012433 Client: 42.829225
Slow Upload: Server: 0.015827 Client: 43.375164
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012503 Client: 43.436595
Slow Upload: Server: 0.005483 Client: 44.088135
Slow Upload: Server: 0.012956 Client: 45.323259
Slow Upload: Server: 0.013261 Client: 46.360929
You can see there's a huge difference between running Unicorn or
Rainbows! with EventMachine. With Unicorn, the diff time would be
quite long, because Unicorn doesn't read the body for you. The read
time would be spent in the application. That means, the Unicorn worker
is blocked until the uploading is done. There could be a sort of DoS
attack which sends a ton of requests with never ending body to
applications whichever try to parse the request body with Unicorn.
While running Rainbows! with EventMachine, the diff time would be
quite short, because Rainbows! would be buffering the body from the
request, and only pass it down to the application whenever it is fully
buffered. The read time would be spent in EventMachine, which won't
block the worker from processing the other fast clients.
According to this document: HTTP Routing and the Routing Mesh: Request buffering. Cedar stack's routers (reverse proxies) won't be buffering the request body, which would make Unicorn very inefficient for slow clients, since it is assuming all clients are fast client. By fast clients, it usually means clients from internal or local network.
That is, by using Unicorn, we would want something like Nginx which would fully buffer all requests for all the clients around the world. You can find this information from Unicorn's documents.
PHILOSOPHY, and DESIGN.
Some quotes:
Instead of attempting to be efficient at serving slow clients, unicorn relies on a buffering reverse proxy to efficiently deal with slow clients.
unicorn uses an old-fashioned preforking worker model with blocking I/O. Our processing model is the antithesis of more modern (and theoretically more efficient) server processing models using threads or non-blocking I/O with events. [...] Like Mongrel, neither keepalive nor pipelining are supported. These aren’t needed since Unicorn is only designed to serve fast, low-latency clients directly. Do one thing, do it well; let nginx handle slow clients.
Recently there's a discussion on Unicorn's mailing list regarding this issue. Here's the thread: Unicorn hangs on POST request
I've some new information. Heroku buffers the headers of a HTTP request but it doesn't buffer the body of POST requests. Because of that I switched to Rainbows! and the responsiveness of the application increased dramatically.
They switched to Rainbows! with EventMachine, which would fully buffer the request/response as in Nginx but with EventMachine, the responsiveness of the application increased dramatically.
The current maintainer of Unicorn and Rainbows! responded with: Re: Unicorn hangs on POST request
However, Rainbows! with EventMachine would still be suffering from head-of-queue blocking issue. That is, suppose our app would do some heavy computing, since EventMachine is single threaded, at the time we're computing, the whole process is still blocking there and therefore cannot keep working for other clients at the same time.
This could be further solved by using threads together, like using CoolioThreadPool or CoolioThreadSpawn. But cool.io is not actively maintained at the moment, and the author Tony Arcieri headed the development to celluloid (which is the core of Sidekiq), celluloid-io, and nio4r.
Last time I tried cool.io (probably two years ago), it even gave me some assertion failures. I don't know if anyone is using cool.io on production, either. Even though Eric Wong is willing to patch cool.io if we can provide reproducible cases, I would rather try to write a celluloid-io based model for Rainbows! since that's the way the community is heading to at the moment.
All after all, we're using a combination of EventMachine and thread pool strategy, which is something like this: Rainbows! config with EventMachine and a thread pool. I was once working on making this merge back to Rainbows!. The unfinished work is located at my branch. It's almost done, but I failed to make one test case pass:
"send big pipelined chunked requests"
I believe not many people are doing pipelined requests combined with big chunked data, and probably this won't even work with Heroku's Erlang routers, so I think it might be fine to use it on Heroku. However, if I cannot make it pass, I don't think it could be merged. The thing which makes it quite hard is the EventMachine API. There's no easy way to tell EventMachine to pause a connection, leaving the data buffered at kernel level.