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WIP: fix: logical size limit is broken during PS restart #6010

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@problame problame commented Dec 1, 2023

fixes #5963

On top of #6000

Will ship this in a release after #6000

The significant behavior change here is that we're making walreceiver wait for exact logical size to be available before establishing a connection.

As a reminder, there is the background task that does the initial logical size calculation.
Before this PR, there was no caller that needed to wait for initial logical size calculation to finish so they could return an Exact value.
Now there is, i.e., get_current_logical_size_exact_wait.

So, we switch from the priority-boosting mechanism introduced in #6000 to using tokio::sync::OnceCell.
Both the background task and get_current_logical_size_exact_wait use it to coalesce on computations.
If background task is first, get_current_logical_size_exact_wait gets an exact result.
If get_current_logical_size_exact_wait is first, background task observes that and exits.

These will help us answer questions such as:
- when & at what do calculations get started after PS restart?
- how often is the api to get current incrementally-computed logical
  size called, and does it return Exact vs Approximate?

I'd also be interested in a histogram of how much wall clock
time size calculations take, but, I don't know good bucket sizes,
and, logging it would introduce yet another per-timeline log
message during startup; don't think that's worth it just yet.

Context

- https://neondb.slack.com/archives/C033RQ5SPDH/p1701197668789769
- #5962
- #5963
- #5955
- neondatabase/cloud#7408
... by panicking on overflow;

It was made fallible initially due to in-confidence in logical size
calculation. However, the error has never happened since I am at Neon.

Let's stop worrying about this by converting the overflow check into a panic.
I would love to not expose the in-accurate value int he mgmt API at all,
and in fact control plane doesn't use it [^1].
But our tests do, and I have no desire to change them at this time.

[^1]: neondatabase/cloud#8317
The priority mechanism introduced earlier should take care of it.
fixes #5963

On top of #6000

Will ship this in a release after #600
@problame problame self-assigned this Dec 1, 2023
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57a7b2e at 2023-12-01T12:05:46.535Z :recycle:

@problame problame force-pushed the problame/init-logical-size-rework branch 3 times, most recently from a717bef to 5b01887 Compare December 1, 2023 18:14
@problame problame force-pushed the problame/init-logical-size-rework branch from 5b01887 to f886a4c Compare December 1, 2023 22:16
Base automatically changed from problame/init-logical-size-rework to main December 4, 2023 17:22
problame added a commit that referenced this pull request Dec 4, 2023
…6000)

Problem
-------

Before this PR, there was no concurrency limit on initial logical size
computations.

While logical size computations are lazy in theory, in practice
(production), they happen in a short timeframe after restart.

This means that on a PS with 20k tenants, we'd have up to 20k concurrent
initial logical size calculation requests.

This is self-inflicted needless overload.

This hasn't been a problem so far because the `.await` points on the
logical size calculation path never return `Pending`, hence we have a
natural concurrency limit of the number of executor threads.
But, as soon as we return `Pending` somewhere in the logical size
calculation path, other concurrent tasks get scheduled by tokio.
If these other tasks are also logical size calculations, they eventually
pound on the same bottleneck.

For example, in #5479, we want to switch the VirtualFile descriptor
cache to a `tokio::sync::RwLock`, which makes us return `Pending`, and
without measures like this patch, after PS restart, VirtualFile
descriptor cache thrashes heavily for 2 hours until all the logical size
calculations have been computed and the degree of concurrency /
concurrent VirtualFile operations is down to regular levels.
See the *Experiment* section below for details.

<!-- Experiments (see below) show that plain #5479 causes heavy
thrashing of the VirtualFile descriptor cache.
The high degree of concurrency is too much for 
In the case of #5479 the VirtualFile descriptor cache size starts
thrashing heavily.


-->

Background
----------

Before this PR, initial logical size calculation was spawned lazily on
first call to `Timeline::get_current_logical_size()`.

In practice (prod), the lazy calculation is triggered by
`WalReceiverConnectionHandler` if the timeline is active according to
storage broker, or by the first iteration of consumption metrics worker
after restart (`MetricsCollection`).

The spawns by walreceiver are high-priority because logical size is
needed by Safekeepers (via walreceiver `PageserverFeedback`) to enforce
the project logical size limit.
The spawns by metrics collection are not on the user-critical path and
hence low-priority. [^consumption_metrics_slo]

[^consumption_metrics_slo]: We can't delay metrics collection
indefintely because there are TBD internal SLOs tied to metrics
collection happening in a timeline manner
(neondatabase/cloud#7408). But let's ignore
that in this issue.

The ratio of walreceiver-initiated spawns vs
consumption-metrics-initiated spawns can be reconstructed from logs
(`spawning logical size computation from context of task kind {:?}"`).
PR #5995 and #6018 adds metrics for this.

First investigation of the ratio lead to the discovery that walreceiver
spawns 75% of init logical size computations.
That's because of two bugs:
- In Safekeepers: #5993
- In interaction between Pageservers and Safekeepers:
#5962

The safekeeper bug is likely primarily responsible but we don't have the
data yet. The metrics will hopefully provide some insights.

When assessing production-readiness of this PR, please assume that
neither of these bugs are fixed yet.


Changes In This PR
------------------

With this PR, initial logical size calculation is reworked as follows:

First, all initial logical size calculation task_mgr tasks are started
early, as part of timeline activation, and run a retry loop with long
back-off until success. This removes the lazy computation; it was
needless complexity because in practice, we compute all logical sizes
anyways, because consumption metrics collects it.

Second, within the initial logical size calculation task, each attempt
queues behind the background loop concurrency limiter semaphore. This
fixes the performance issue that we pointed out in the "Problem" section
earlier.

Third, there is a twist to queuing behind the background loop
concurrency limiter semaphore. Logical size is needed by Safekeepers
(via walreceiver `PageserverFeedback`) to enforce the project logical
size limit. However, we currently do open walreceiver connections even
before we have an exact logical size. That's bad, and I'll build on top
of this PR to fix that
(#5963). But, for the
purposes of this PR, we don't want to introduce a regression, i.e., we
don't want to provide an exact value later than before this PR. The
solution is to introduce a priority-boosting mechanism
(`GetLogicalSizePriority`), allowing callers of
`Timeline::get_current_logical_size` to specify how urgently they need
an exact value. The effect of specifying high urgency is that the
initial logical size calculation task for the timeline will skip the
concurrency limiting semaphore. This should yield effectively the same
behavior as we had before this PR with lazy spawning.

Last, the priority-boosting mechanism obsoletes the `init_order`'s grace
period for initial logical size calculations. It's a separate commit to
reduce the churn during review. We can drop that commit if people think
it's too much churn, and commit it later once we know this PR here
worked as intended.

Experiment With #5479 
---------------------

I validated this PR combined with #5479 to assess whether we're making
forward progress towards asyncification.

The setup is an `i3en.3xlarge` instance with 20k tenants, each with one
timeline that has 9 layers.
All tenants are inactive, i.e., not known to SKs nor storage broker.
This means all initial logical size calculations are spawned by
consumption metrics `MetricsCollection` task kind.
The consumption metrics worker starts requesting logical sizes at low
priority immediately after restart. This is achieved by deleting the
consumption metrics cache file on disk before starting
PS.[^consumption_metrics_cache_file]

[^consumption_metrics_cache_file] Consumption metrics worker persists
its interval across restarts to achieve persistent reporting intervals
across PS restarts; delete the state file on disk to get predictable
(and I believe worst-case in terms of concurrency during PS restart)
behavior.

Before this patch, all of these timelines would all do their initial
logical size calculation in parallel, leading to extreme thrashing in
page cache and virtual file cache.

With this patch, the virtual file cache thrashing is reduced
significantly (from 80k `open`-system-calls/second to ~500
`open`-system-calls/second during loading).


### Critique

The obvious critique with above experiment is that there's no skipping
of the semaphore, i.e., the priority-boosting aspect of this PR is not
exercised.

If even just 1% of our 20k tenants in the setup were active in
SK/storage_broker, then 200 logical size calculations would skip the
limiting semaphore immediately after restart and run concurrently.

Further critique: given the two bugs wrt timeline inactive vs active
state that were mentioned in the Background section, we could have 75%
of our 20k tenants being (falsely) active on restart.

So... (next section)

This Doesn't Make Us Ready For Async VirtualFile
------------------------------------------------

This PR is a step towards asynchronous `VirtualFile`, aka, #5479 or even
#4744.

But it doesn't yet enable us to ship #5479.

The reason is that this PR doesn't limit the amount of high-priority
logical size computations.
If there are many high-priority logical size calculations requested,
we'll fall over like we did if #5479 is applied without this PR.
And currently, at very least due to the bugs mentioned in the Background
section, we run thousands of high-priority logical size calculations on
PS startup in prod.

So, at a minimum, we need to fix these bugs.

Then we can ship #5479 and #4744, and things will likely be fine under
normal operation.

But in high-traffic situations, overload problems will still be more
likely to happen, e.g., VirtualFile cache descriptor thrashing.
The solution candidates for that are orthogonal to this PR though:
* global concurrency limiting
* per-tenant rate limiting => #5899
* load shedding
* scaling bottleneck resources (fd cache size (neondatabase/cloud#8351),
page cache size(neondatabase/cloud#8351), spread load across more PSes,
etc)

Conclusion
----------

Even with the remarks from in the previous section, we should merge this
PR because:
1. it's an improvement over the status quo (esp. if the aforementioned
bugs wrt timeline active / inactive are fixed)
2. it prepares the way for
#6010
3. it gets us close to shipping #5479 and #4744
@problame
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This implements "Design Idea 2" in the associated issue #5963

However, we decided to go with "Design Idea 1" #5963 (comment)

@problame problame closed this Jun 19, 2024
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logical size limit is broken during PS restart
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