Re: [jetty-users] Interleaving requests for fairness/starvation?

[Greg Wilkins <gregw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matt,

Are you doing this to try to limit the total threads, or just to make sure that some threads are not starving others?   If you don't mind the total number of threads, then you could simply put in a Thread.yield() call every 50ms and not worry about async servlet handling.

Note also, from a users perspective, having requests that can take many minutes to respond is not great.  If your clients are browsers, then it could be better to separate your handling from the request/response thread - ie start the handling and then immediately respond. Your clients could then poll (or better yet long poll) to see progress and to get the final state.

I'm very cautious about any approach that changes the behaviour of the threadpool, especially tryExecute.  The behaviour there is all very finely tuned to our scheduling strategies to avoid deadlocks and thread starvation.

If you do want to use servlet async to do the interleaving, you need to get other requests/threads to do the dispatching.  EG every 50ms of processing your app can look at a concurrent list to see if other processes are waiting to be handled, if they are, then dispatch the first of them then  start async and add your AsyncContext to the end of the queue.  The problem with this approach is how does the first request ever get added to the queue?  Perhaps you need a limit on concurrent handling as well and if you are above that, add yourself to the queue... if you finish handling and reduce the handling count below the threshhold, then you can also wakeup any waiting contexts on the queue.      This is making Thread.yield feel very simple.

cheers

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 13:51, Matthew Boughen <knabbers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi

I was wondering if anyone could confirm whether what we've done is sensible - it seems to work, but I'm not really confident and would like to know how righteous it is!

Our HTTP server processes requests that can take minutes at a time, the handling for which can easily be broken down into small chunks. We would like to interleave the handling of these requests so that none get starved and time out (and to help with fairness). For each request, after 50ms of handling, we asynchronously suspend the request and (hope to) redispatch it to the queue behind newly arrived requests / other more-recently suspended requests.

With this approach, the issue seems to be in choosing where to call asyncContext.dispatch: too close to the suspend call (startAsync) and Jetty will not release the thread back to allow processing of other queued requests (presumably because Jetty thinks it's more efficient to avoid the context switch and so immediately continues processing the current request). 

We've currently settled on overriding QueuedThreadPool.execute(Runnable) and tryExecute(Runnable) to wrap the Runnable: any request that had registered itself while the original (unwrapped) Runnable was called is now redispatched. This seems to work in that: (a) only one request attempts to register itself each time a Runnable is run, (b) the redispatch normally seems to happen very quickly after the request has registered itself, and (c) the request handling is indeed interleaved.

Does that sound like the right thing to do here? I'm thinking it would be as long as each request handle is guaranteed to be the tail call of a task submitted to the thread pool (I don't know enough about the use of ExecutionStrategy to know this).

Any suggestions/comments are highly appreciated.

Matt

P.S. I'm anticipating that the right thing to do might be to use a separate thread pool and manage the interleaving there? This of course would incur another thread context switch / managing another pool. We're also using ThreadLimitHandler to avoid single clients taking out the whole server, so would need to duplicate that logic.

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Greg Wilkins <gregw@xxxxxxxxxxx> CTO http://webtide.com