So far we've been using Go's native time.Time for anything related to sample
timestamps. Since the range of time.Time is much bigger than what we need, this
has created two problems:
- there could be time.Time values which were out of the range/precision of the
time type that we persist to disk, therefore causing incorrectly ordered keys.
One bug caused by this was:
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/367
It would be good to use a timestamp type that's more closely aligned with
what the underlying storage supports.
- sizeof(time.Time) is 192, while Prometheus should be ok with a single 64-bit
Unix timestamp (possibly even a 32-bit one). Since we store samples in large
numbers, this seriously affects memory usage. Furthermore, copying/working
with the data will be faster if it's smaller.
*MEMORY USAGE RESULTS*
Initial memory usage comparisons for a running Prometheus with 1 timeseries and
100,000 samples show roughly a 13% decrease in total (VIRT) memory usage. In my
tests, this advantage for some reason decreased a bit the more samples the
timeseries had (to 5-7% for millions of samples). This I can't fully explain,
but perhaps garbage collection issues were involved.
*WHEN TO USE THE NEW TIMESTAMP TYPE*
The new clientmodel.Timestamp type should be used whenever time
calculations are either directly or indirectly related to sample
timestamps.
For example:
- the timestamp of a sample itself
- all kinds of watermarks
- anything that may become or is compared to a sample timestamp (like the timestamp
passed into Target.Scrape()).
When to still use time.Time:
- for measuring durations/times not related to sample timestamps, like duration
telemetry exporting, timers that indicate how frequently to execute some
action, etc.
*NOTE ON OPERATOR OPTIMIZATION TESTS*
We don't use operator optimization code anymore, but it still lives in
the code as dead code. It still has tests, but I couldn't get all of them to
pass with the new timestamp format. I commented out the failing cases for now,
but we should probably remove the dead code soon. I just didn't want to do that
in the same change as this.
Change-Id: I821787414b0debe85c9fffaeb57abd453727af0f
There are too many parameters to constructing a LevelDB storage
instance for a construction method, so I've opted to take an
idiomatic approach of embedding them in a struct for easier
mediation and versioning.
This also short-circuits optimize() for now, since it is complex to implement
for the new operator, and ops generated by the query layer already fulfill the
needed invariants. We should still investigate later whether to completely
delete operator optimization code or extend it to support
getValueRangeAtIntervalOp operators.
This is mainly a small performance improvement, since we skip past the last
extracted time immediately if it was also the last sample in the chunk, instead
of trying to extract non-existent values before the chunk end again and again
and only gradually approaching the end of the chunk.
- only the data extracted in the last loop iteration of ExtractSamples() was
emitted as output
- if e.g. op interval < sample interval, there were situations where the same
sample was added multiple times to the output
Julius Volz
Matt T. Proud