azure queue performance - c#

For the windows azure queues the scalability target per storage is supposed to be around 500 messages / second (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh697709.aspx). I have the following simple program that just writes a few messages to a queue. The program takes 10 seconds to complete (4 messages / second). I am running the program from inside a virtual machine (on west-europe) and my storage account also is located in west-europe. I don't have setup geo replication for my storage. My connection string is setup to use the http protocol.
// http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/06/25/nagle-s-algorithm-is-not-friendly-towards-small-requests.aspx
ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm = false;
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount=CloudStorageAccount.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DataConnectionString"]);
var cloudQueueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
var queue = cloudQueueClient.GetQueueReference(Guid.NewGuid().ToString());
queue.CreateIfNotExist();
var w = new Stopwatch();
w.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 50;i++ )
{
Console.WriteLine("nr {0}",i);
queue.AddMessage(new CloudQueueMessage("hello "+i));
}
w.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("elapsed: {0}", w.ElapsedMilliseconds);
queue.Delete();
Any idea how I can get better performance?
EDIT:
Based on Sandrino Di Mattia's answer I re-analyzed the code I've originally posted and found out that it was not complete enough to reproduce the error. In fact I had created a queue just before the call to ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm = false; The code to reproduce my problem looks more like this:
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount=CloudStorageAccount.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DataConnectionString"]);
var cloudQueueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
var queue = cloudQueueClient.GetQueueReference(Guid.NewGuid().ToString());
//ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm = false; // If you change the nagle algorithm here, the performance will be okay.
queue.CreateIfNotExist();
ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm = false; // TOO LATE, the queue is already created without 'nagle'
var w = new Stopwatch();
w.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 50;i++ )
{
Console.WriteLine("nr {0}",i);
queue.AddMessage(new CloudQueueMessage("hello "+i));
}
w.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("elapsed: {0}", w.ElapsedMilliseconds);
queue.Delete();
The suggested solution from Sandrino to configure the ServicePointManager using the app.config file has the advantage that the ServicePointManager is initialized when the application starts up, so you don't have to worry about time dependencies.

I answered a similar question a few days ago: How to achive more 10 inserts per second with azure storage tables.
For adding 1000 items in table storage it took over 3 minutes, and with the changes I described in my answer it dropped to 4 seconds (250 requests/sec). In the end, table storage and storage queues aren't all that different. The backend is the same, data is simply stored in a different way. And both table storage and queues are exposed through a REST API, so if you improve the way you handle your requests, you'll get a better performance.
The most important changes:
expect100Continue: false
useNagleAlgorithm: false (you're already doing this)
Parallel requests combined with connectionManagement/maxconnection

Also, ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit should be increased before making a service point. Actually Sandrino's answer says the same thing but using config.
Turn off proxy detection even in the cloud. Auto detect in proxy config element. Slows initialisation.
Choose distributed partition keys.
Collocate your account near to compute, and customers.
Design to add more accounts as needed.
Microsoft set the SLA at 2,000 tps on queues and tables as of 07 2012.
I didn't read Sandrino's linked answer, sorry, just was on this question as I was watching Build 2012 session on exactly this.

Related

RabbitMQ on Windows seems to limit connection creation per process

I want to understand the behavior I'm seeing with the following code. Using the RabbitMQ.Client library version 6.2.2.
Expected behavior: Connections are created quickly and the process does not slow down.
Actual behavior: First 6 connections are created quickly, after that there is a significant slowdown and connections are created one by done (1s apart).
Note; starting the program multiple times shows similar behavior. That leads me to believe that the bottleneck is per-process rather than RabbitMQ or system resources.
Note 2; system resources are not the bottleneck (AFAIK).
Does anybody know what is causing the observed behavior? RabbitMQ installed on Windows 10 with default settings.
using RabbitMQ.Client;
using System;
namespace ConsoleApp1
{
internal class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++)
{
var factory = new ConnectionFactory() { HostName = "localhost" };
var connection = factory.CreateConnection();
var channel1 = connection.CreateModel();
var channel2 = connection.CreateModel();
Console.WriteLine(i);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
EDIT: I know this violates every best practice regarding "Single connection per process". I'm just curious what is limiting the connection creation and if there is any setting that can control this behavior.
The .NET client uses the ThreadPool which probably doesn't have enough threads out of the box. You need to increase the amount available:
https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-dotnet-client/blob/main/projects/TestApplications/MassPublish/Program.cs#L21
See issues and discussion here:
https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-dotnet-client/search?q=threadpool
NOTE: the RabbitMQ team monitors the rabbitmq-users mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.

SubscriptionClient.RecieveBatch not retrieving all the brokered messages

I have a console application to read all the brokered messages present in the subscription on the Azure Service Bus. I have around 3500 messages in there. This is my code to read the messages:
SubscriptionClient client = messagingFactory.CreateSubscriptionClient(topic, subscription);
long count = namespaceManager.GetSubscription(topic, subscription).MessageCountDetails.ActiveMessageCount;
Console.WriteLine("Total messages to process : {0}", count.ToString()); //Here the number is showing correctly
IEnumerable<BrokeredMessage> dlIE = null;
dlIE = client.ReceiveBatch(Convert.ToInt32(count));
When I execute the code, in the dlIE, I can see only 256 messages. I have also tried giving the prefetch count like this client.PrefetchCountbut then also it returns 256 messages only.
I think there is some limit to the number of messages that can be retrieved at a time.However there is no such thing mentioned on the msdn page for the RecieveBatch method. What can I do to retrieve all messages at a time?
Note:
I only want to read the message and then let it exist on the service bus. Therefore I do not use message.complete method.
I cannot remove and re-create the topic/subscription from the Service Bus.
Edit:
I used PeekBatch instead of ReceiveBatch like this:
IEnumerable<BrokeredMessage> dlIE = null;
List<BrokeredMessage> bmList = new List<BrokeredMessage>();
long i = 0;
dlIE = subsciptionClient.PeekBatch(Convert.ToInt32(count)); // count is the total number of messages in the subscription.
bmList.AddRange(dlIE);
i = dlIE.Count();
if(i < count)
{
while(i < count)
{
IEnumerable<BrokeredMessage> dlTemp = null;
dlTemp = subsciptionClient.PeekBatch(i, Convert.ToInt32(count));
bmList.AddRange(dlTemp);
i = i + dlTemp.Count();
}
}
I have 3255 messages in the subscription. When the first time peekBatch is called it gets 250 messages. so it goes into the while loop with PeekBatch(250,3225). Every time 250 messages are only received. The final total messages I am having in the output list is 3500 with duplicates. I am not able to understand how this is happening.
I have figured it out. The subscription client remembers the last batch it retrieved and when called again, retrieves the next batch.
So the code would be :
IEnumerable<BrokeredMessage> dlIE = null;
List<BrokeredMessage> bmList = new List<BrokeredMessage>();
long i = 0;
while (i < count)
{
dlIE = subsciptionClient.PeekBatch(Convert.ToInt32(count));
bmList.AddRange(dlIE);
i = i + dlIE.Count();
}
Thanks to MikeWo for guidance
Note: There seems to be some kind of a size limit on the number of messages you can peek at a time. I tried with different subscriptions and the number of messages fetched were different for each.
Is the topic you are writing to partitioned by chance? When you receive messages from a partitioned entity it will only fetch from one of the partitions at a time. From MSDN:
"When a client wants to receive a message from a partitioned queue, or from a subscription of a partitioned topic, Service Bus queries all fragments for messages, then returns the first message that is returned from any of the messaging stores to the receiver. Service Bus caches the other messages and returns them when it receives additional receive requests. A receiving client is not aware of the partitioning; the client-facing behavior of a partitioned queue or topic (for example, read, complete, defer, deadletter, prefetching) is identical to the behavior of a regular entity."
It's probably not a good idea to assume that even with a non partitioned entity that you'd get all messages in one go with really either the Receive or Peek methods. It would be much more efficient to loop through the messages in much smaller batches, especially if your message have any decent size to them or are indeterminate in size.
Since you don't actually want to remove the message from the queue I'd suggest using PeekBatch instead of ReceiveBatch. This lets you get a copy of the message and doesn't lock it. I'd highly suggest a loop using the same SubscriptionClient in conjunction with PeekBatch. By using the same SubscriptionClient with PeekBatch under the hood the last pulled sequence number is kept as as you loop through it should keep track and go through the whole queue. This would essentially let you read through the entire queue.
I came across a similar issue where client.ReceiveBatchAsync(....) would not retrieve any data from the subscription in the azure service bus.
After some digging around I found out that there is a bit for each subscriber to enable batch operations. This can only be enabled through powershell. Below is the command I used:
$subObject = Get-AzureRmServiceBusSubscription -ResourceGroup '#resourceName' -NamespaceName '#namespaceName' -Topic '#topicName' -SubscriptionName '#subscriptionName'
$subObject.EnableBatchedOperations = $True
Set-AzureRmServiceBusSubscription -ResourceGroup '#resourceName' -NamespaceName '#namespaceName' -Topic '#topicName'-SubscriptionObj $subObject
More details can be found here. While it still didn't load all the messages at least it started to clear the queue. As far as I'm aware, the batch size parameter is only there as a suggestion to the service bus but not a rule.
Hope it helps!

Speed up reverse DNS lookups for large batch of IPs

For analytics purposes, I'd like to perform reverse DNS lookups on large batches of IPs. "Large" meaning, at least tens of thousands per hour. I'm looking for ways to increase the processing rate, i.e. lower the processing time per batch.
Wrapping the async version of Dns.GetHostEntry into await-able tasks has already helped a lot (compared to sequential requests), leading to a throughput of appox. 100-200 IPs/second:
static async Task DoReverseDnsLookups()
{
// in reality, thousands of IPs
var ips = new[] { "173.194.121.9", "173.252.110.27", "98.138.253.109" };
var hosts = new Dictionary<string, string>();
var tasks =
ips.Select(
ip =>
Task.Factory.FromAsync(Dns.BeginGetHostEntry,
(Func<IAsyncResult, IPHostEntry>) Dns.EndGetHostEntry,
ip, null)
.ContinueWith(t =>
hosts[ip] = ((t.Exception == null) && (t.Result != null))
? t.Result.HostName : null));
var start = DateTime.UtcNow;
await Task.WhenAll(tasks);
var end = DateTime.UtcNow;
Console.WriteLine("Resolved {0} IPs in {1}, that's {2}/sec.",
ips.Count(), end - start,
ips.Count() / (end - start).TotalSeconds);
}
Any ideas how to further improve the processing rate?
For instance, is there any way to send a batch of IPs to the DNS server?
Btw, I'm assuming that under the covers, I/O Completion Ports are used by the async methods - correct me if I'm wrong please.
Hello here are some tips so you can improve:
Cache the queries locally since this information don't usually change for
days or even years. This way you don't have to resolve every time.
Most DNS servers will automatically cache the information, so the next time it will resolve
pretty fast. Usually the cache is 4 hours, at least it is the default on Windows servers.
This means that if you run this process in a batch in a short period, it will perform better that
if you resolve the addresses several times during the day allowing cahce to expire.
It is good that you are using Task Parallelism but you are still asking the same DNS servers
configured on your machine. I think that having two machines using different DNS servers will
improve the process.
I hope this helps.
As always, I would suggest using TPL Dataflow's ActionBlock instead of firing all requests at once and waiting for all to complete. Using an ActionBlock with a high MaxDegreeOfParallelism lets the TPL decide for itself how many calls to fire concurrently, which can lead to a better utilization of resources:
var block = new ActionBlock<string>(
async ip =>
{
try
{
var host = (await Dns.GetHostEntryAsync(ip)).HostName;
if (!string.IsNullOrWhitespace(host))
{
hosts[ip] = host;
}
}
catch
{
return;
}
},
new ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 5000});
I would also suggest adding a cache, and making sure you don't resolve the same ip more than once.
When you use .net's Dns class it includes some fallbacks beside DNS (e.g LLMNR), which makes it very slow. If all you need are DNS queries you might want to use a dedicated library like ARSoft.Tools.Net.
P.S: Some remarks about your code sample:
You should be using GetHostEntryAsync instead of FromAsync
The continuation can potentially run on different threads so you should really be using ConcurrentDictionary.

HttpWebRequest timing out on third try, only two connections allowed HTTP 1.1 [duplicate]

I'm developing an application (winforms C# .NET 4.0) where I access a lookup functionality from a 3rd party through a simple HTTP request. I call an url with a parameter, and in return I get a small string with the result of the lookup. Simple enough.
The challenge is however, that I have to do lots of these lookups (a couple of thousands), and I would like to limit the time needed. Therefore I would like to run requests in parallel (say 10-20). I use a ThreadPool to do this, and the short version of my code looks like this:
public void startAsyncLookup(Action<LookupResult> returnLookupResult)
{
this.returnLookupResult = returnLookupResult;
foreach (string number in numbersToLookup)
{
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(lookupNumber, number);
}
}
public void lookupNumber(Object threadContext)
{
string numberToLookup = (string)threadContext;
string url = #"http://some.url.com/?number=" + numberToLookup;
WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
Stream responseData = webClient.OpenRead(url);
LookupResult lookupResult = parseLookupResult(responseData);
returnLookupResult(lookupResult);
}
I fill up numbersToLookup (a List<String>) from another place, call startAsyncLookup and provide it with a call-back function returnLookupResult to return each result. This works, but I found that I'm not getting the throughput I want.
Initially I thought it might be the 3rd party having a poor system on their end, but I excluded this by trying to run the same code from two different machines at the same time. Each of the two took as long as one did alone, so I could rule out that one.
A colleague then tipped me that this might be a limitation in Windows. I googled a bit, and found amongst others this post saying that by default Windows limits the number of simultaneous request to the same web server to 4 for HTTP 1.0 and to 2 for HTTP 1.1 (for HTTP 1.1 this is actually according to the specification (RFC2068)).
The same post referred to above also provided a way to increase these limits. By adding two registry values to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings] (MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server), I could control this myself.
So, I tried this (sat both to 20), restarted my computer, and tried to run my program again. Sadly though, it didn't seem to help any. I also kept an eye on the Resource Monitor while running my batch lookup, and I noticed that my application (the one with the title blacked out) still only was using two TCP connections.
So, the question is, why isn't this working? Is the post I linked to using the wrong registry values? Is this perhaps not possible to "hack" in Windows any longer (I'm on Windows 7)?
And just in case anyone should wonder, I have also tried with different settings for MaxThreads on ThreadPool (everything from 10 to 100), and this didn't seem to affect my throughput at all, so the problem shouldn't be there either.
It is matter of ServicePoint. Which provides connection management for HTTP connections.
The default maximum number of concurrent connections allowed by a ServicePoint object is 2.
So if you need to increase it you can use ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit property. Just check the link in MSDN there you can see a sample. And set the value you need.
For quicker reference for someone. To increase the connection limit per host you can do this in your Main() or anytime before you begin making the HTTP requests.
System.Net.ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 1000; //or some other number > 4
Fire and forget this method from your main method. Icognito user is correct, only 2 threads are allowed to play at the same time.
private static void openServicePoint()
{
ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm = true;
ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = true;
ServicePointManager.CheckCertificateRevocationList = true;
ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 10000;
Uri MS = new Uri("http://My awesome web site");
ServicePoint servicePoint = ServicePointManager.FindServicePoint(MS);
}
For Internet Explorer 8:
Run Registry Editor and navigate to following key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTION SPERSERVER
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTION SPER1_0SERVER
If FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPERSERVER and FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER1_0SERVER are missing then create them. Now create DWORD Value called iexplore.exe for both sub keys (listed above) and set their value to 10 or whatever number desired.

.NET best practices for MongoDB connections?

I've been playing with MongoDB recently (It's AMAZINGLY FAST) using the C# driver on GitHub. Everything is working just fine in my little single threaded console app that I'm testing with. I'm able to add 1,000,000 documents (yes, million) in under 8 seconds running single threaded. I only get this performance if I use the connection outside the scope of a for loop. In other words, I'm keeping the connection open for each insert rather than connecting for each insert. Obviously that's contrived.
I thought I'd crank it up a notch to see how it works with multiple threads. I'm doing this because I need to simulate a website with multiple concurrent requests. I'm spinning up between 15 and 50 threads, still inserting a total of 150,000 documents in all cases. If I just let the threads run, each creating a new connection for each insert operation, the performance grinds to a halt.
Obviously I need to find a way to share, lock, or pool the connection. Therein lies the question. What's the best practice in terms of connecting to MongoDB? Should the connection be kept open for the life of the app (there is substantial latency opening and closing the TCP connection for each operation)?
Does anyone have any real world or production experience with MongoDB, and specifically the underlying connection?
Here is my threading sample using a static connection that's locked for insert operations. Please offer suggestions that would maximize performance and reliability in a web context!
private static Mongo _mongo;
private static void RunMongoThreaded()
{
_mongo = new Mongo();
_mongo.Connect();
var threadFinishEvents = new List<EventWaitHandle>();
for(var i = 0; i < 50; i++)
{
var threadFinish = new EventWaitHandle(false, EventResetMode.ManualReset);
threadFinishEvents.Add(threadFinish);
var thread = new Thread(delegate()
{
RunMongoThread();
threadFinish.Set();
});
thread.Start();
}
WaitHandle.WaitAll(threadFinishEvents.ToArray());
_mongo.Disconnect();
}
private static void RunMongoThread()
{
for (var i = 0; i < 3000; i++)
{
var db = _mongo.getDB("Sample");
var collection = db.GetCollection("Users");
var user = GetUser(i);
var document = new Document();
document["FirstName"] = user.FirstName;
document["LastName"] = user.LastName;
lock (_mongo) // Lock the connection - not ideal for threading, but safe and seemingly fast
{
collection.Insert(document);
}
}
}
Most answers here are outdated and are no longer applicable as the .net driver has matured and had numberless features added.
Looking at the documentation of the new 2.0 driver found here:
http://mongodb.github.io/mongo-csharp-driver/2.0/reference/driver/connecting/
The .net driver is now thread safe and handles connection pooling. According to documentation
It is recommended to store a MongoClient instance in a global place, either as a static variable or in an IoC container with a singleton lifetime.
The thing to remember about a static connection is that it's shared among all your threads. What you want is one connection per thread.
When using mongodb-csharp you treat it like you would an ADO connection.
When you create a Mongo object it borrows a connection from the pool, which it owns until it is disposed. So after the using block the connection is back into the pool.
Creating Mongo objects are cheap and fast.
Example
for(var i=0;i<100;i++)
{
using(var mongo1 = new Mongo())
using(var mongo2 = new Mongo())
{
mongo1.Connect();
mongo2.Connect();
}
}
Database Log
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58214 #1
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58215 #2
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 MessagingPort recv() errno:0 No error 127.0.0.1:58214
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 end connection 127.0.0.1:58214
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 MessagingPort recv() errno:0 No error 127.0.0.1:58215
Wed Jun 02 20:54:21 end connection 127.0.0.1:58215
Notice it only opened 2 connections.
I put this together using mongodb-csharp forum.
http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-csharp/browse_thread/thread/867fa78d726b1d4
Somewhat but still of interest is CSMongo, a C# driver for MongoDB created by the developer of jLinq. Here's a sample:
//create a database instance
using (MongoDatabase database = new MongoDatabase(connectionString)) {
//create a new document to add
MongoDocument document = new MongoDocument(new {
name = "Hugo",
age = 30,
admin = false
});
//create entire objects with anonymous types
document += new {
admin = true,
website = "http://www.hugoware.net",
settings = new {
color = "orange",
highlight = "yellow",
background = "abstract.jpg"
}
};
//remove fields entirely
document -= "languages";
document -= new[] { "website", "settings.highlight" };
//or even attach other documents
MongoDocument stuff = new MongoDocument(new {
computers = new [] {
"Dell XPS",
"Sony VAIO",
"Macbook Pro"
}
});
document += stuff;
//insert the document immediately
database.Insert("users", document);
}
Connection Pool should be your answer.
The feature is being developed (please see http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/CSHARP-9 for more detail).
Right now, for web application, the best practice is to connect at the BeginRequest and release the connection at EndRequest. But to me, I think that operation is too expensive for each request without Connection Pool. So I decide to have the global Mongo object and using that as shared resource for every threads (If you get the latest C# driver from github right now, they also improve the performance for concurrency a bit).
I don't know the disadvantage for using Global Mongo object. So let's wait for another expert to comment on this.
But I think I can live with it until the feature(Connection pool) have been completed.
I am using csharp-mongodb driver and it doesn't help me with his connection pool :( I have about 10-20 request to mongodb per web request.(150 users online - average) And i can't even monitor statistics or connect to mongodb from shell it throw exception to me.
I have created repository, which open and dispose connection per request. I rely on such things as:
1) Driver has connection pool
2) After my research(i have posted some question in user groups about this) - i understood that creating mongo object and open connection doesn't heavy operation, so heavy operation.
But today my production go down :(
May be i have to save open connection per request...
here is link to user group http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/3d4a4e6c5eb48be3#

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