Afpy Camp Wrapup -- RedBarrel + Pistil + 0mq

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We had a lot of fun at the Afpy Computer Camp this year. Some people worked on RedBarrel with me and some others on various topics, including Pyti -- A GSOC project.

In RedBarrel, besides fixing a lot of bugs we did the following:

We've finished two socket.io based demos

  • a monitoring page that displays in real-time using Flot the CPU and memory usage of the server
  • an url shortener that provides a monitoring page where you can see on a google map a live stream of the location of the URL visitors.

We've integrated Pistil into Redbarrel

We started to integrate scaling features

Pistil is Benoit's new project. It's a project very similar to Gunicorn that allows you to define how a web server behaves via "workers" and "arbiters". Pistil is basically replacing all Gunicorn components except the command line script. One nice feature Benoit added to Pistil this week-end is the ability to define different kind of workers.

That's because in Redbarrel we need:
- some RedBarrel workers, each one running a RedBarrel wsgi server to build the responses -- see this code - One Flash server policy worker for the flash fallback in socket.io -- see this code - A Broadcast server -- I'll explain why later

Once you've integrated Pistil, you just need to add a custom command-line script in your app and call arbiter.run()-- see this code

From now on, RedBarrel doesn't need GUnicorn anymore to run and manage several processes. yay.

Scaling RedBarrel

The goal of integrating Pistil into Redbarrel was to make it possible to run several processes (==workers) to handle more requests.

RedBarrel is using Gevent underneath via gevent.socketio, so that gives a single worker the ability to run a lot of concurrent requests already. But still, if you're doing database accesses in your application, you will need to run several workers if you want to handle several hundreds of concurrent requests.

And that leads to another issue : if the application uses the socket.io features, we need the ability to broadcast messages to all connected clients no matter which process they're in. gevent.socketio implements this feature using Gevent queues in memory, so it's constrained to a single process.

If you have several processes, you need to be able to broadcast messages to all the workers in order to reach all connected clients. A inter-process communication protocol needs to be set up for this.

zeromq to the rescue !

zeromq integration

zeromq seems to be the best tool for this, because it hides all the complexity when you need to set up a simple communication protocol between several processes and servers. zeromq also allows you to use different transports, whether they are local to the same server (ipc) or between servers (tcp).

zeromq provides several behaviors to exchange messages : PUSH/PULL, PUB/SUB etc. see its nice doc.

For our use case, we need to be able to broadcast messages from any worker to all other workers. Instead of linking all workers to each other, a simpler pattern is to have a single server that is responsible for all the broadcasting. Workers subscribe to it to receive messages, but also can send messages to broadcast to the server.

Setting this up with zeromq is done by using a bi-directional communication through 2 channels:

A publisher/subscribers channel.

  • the publisher is a single zeromq server that is able to broadcast messages to several subscribers.
  • each worker becomes a subscriber and receives messages from the publisher.

A push/pull channel.

  • each worker may push messages to be broadcasted to the publisher
  • the publisher pulls messages and broadcasts them to all subscribers

That sounds like a complex setup, but is not at all ! In my first load tests it seems very efficient.

To implement this in RedBarrel, we used pymzq. We also needed to use[gevent_zmq][]. This small library simply makes pymzq green, so it's compatible with Gevent. The code I added is composed of a Broadcaster class and a Client class. It's very straightforward. You can read the code here.

Now when RedBarrel is launched, one Broadcaster is launched and every worker has one zmq Client, allowing inter-worker broadcasting.image

Next steps

The next steps are:
- make gevent.socketio use our zeromq system. gevent.socketio currently uses Queues to push and pull messages to be broadcasted. We can keep these queues and just feed them via zeromq. What I need to do here is to hook the worker's broadcasting feature into the code that interacts with the queue. - allow inter-servers communication. this will simply be done by allowing a broadcaster to become a subscriber of other servers broadcasters, so it can broadcast locally to its own subscriber what was broadcasted in the other server. What I am unsure about yet is how the whole thing will scale under a very heavy message load.

Some other features ideas we had:
- provide a key/value storage using redis and a pure-python fallback and allow its definition via the DSL. - add an event system based on the zeromq integration. one event that comes in mind: broadcast to all workers an event everytime a key is changed in the storage.

And, yeah, we ate and drunk a lot..