An design question was open for me in the beginning was whether to
serialize other types to disk, but Protocol Buffers quickly won out,
which allows us to drop support for other types. This is a good
start to cleaning up a lot of cruft in the storage stack and
can let us eventually decouple the various moving parts into
separate subsystems for easier reasoning.
This commit is not strictly required, but it is a start to making
the rest a lot more enjoyable to interact with.
The reality is that if we ever try to encode a Protocol Buffer and it
fails, it's likely that such an error is ultimately not a runtime error
and should be fixed forthwith. Thusly, we should rename
``Encoder.Encode`` to ``Encoder.MustEncode`` and drop the error return
value.
This commit introduces to Prometheus a batch database sample curator,
which corroborates the high watermarks for sample series against the
curation watermark table to see whether a curator of a given type
needs to be run.
The curator is an abstract executor, which runs various curation
strategies across the database. It remarks the progress for each
type of curation processor that runs for a given sample series.
A curation procesor is responsible for effectuating the underlying
batch changes that are request. In this commit, we introduce the
CompactionProcessor, which takes several bits of runtime metadata and
combine sparse sample entries in the database together to form larger
groups. For instance, for a given series it would be possible to
have the curator effectuate the following grouping:
- Samples Older than Two Weeks: Grouped into Bunches of 10000
- Samples Older than One Week: Grouped into Bunches of 1000
- Samples Older than One Day: Grouped into Bunches of 100
- Samples Older than One Hour: Grouped into Bunches of 10
The benefits hereof of such a compaction are 1. a smaller search
space in the database keyspace, 2. better employment of compression
for repetious values, and 3. reduced seek times.
It is the case with the benchmark tool that we thought that we
generated multiple series and saved them to the disk as such, when
in reality, we overwrote the fields of the outgoing metrics via
Go map reference behavior. This was accidental. In the course of
diagnosing this, a few errors were found:
1. ``newSeriesFrontier`` should check to see if the candidate fingerprint is within the given domain of the ``diskFrontier``. If not, as the contract in the docstring stipulates, a ``nil`` ``seriesFrontier`` should be emitted.
2. In the interests of aiding debugging, the raw LevelDB ``levigoIterator`` type now includes a helpful forensics ``String()`` method.
This work produced additional cleanups:
1. ``Close() error`` with the storage stack is technically incorrect, since nowhere in the bowels of it does an error actually occur. The interface has been simplified to remove this for now.
- Kill Close in Persistent and document interface.
- Extract batching behavior into interface.
- Kill IteratorManager, which was used for unknown reasons.
Matt T. Proud
Matt T. Proud