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David Karnok commented on CASSANDRA-10528:
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I'm glad you want to switch to the reactive world, however, depending on the
urgency, I'd design for a Reactive-Streams based API. (Reactive-Streams is an
initiative to have a standard set of interfaces and a protocol for reactive
dataflows on the JVM that allows interoperation between compatible libraries).
The RxJava 1.x library is mature indeed but has reached its performance
potential limit due to its architecture. Version 2, which is fully
Reactive-Streams, has generally better performance. Unfortunately, Netflix
takes its sweet time with it and since Ben left the project, there is no one to
push it forward. It could take a year to have a stable API.
Alternatively, the Project Reactor (also fully Reactive-Streams) seems to be
closest to a stable release with its version 2.5. It is kind of an RxJava lite
but also has some non-overlapping features with RxJava. It is the most advanced
and most performant RS library currently available. The unfortunate thing is
that its API is still in flux (pun intended) as bad old habits get ironed out,
therefore, expect its snapshot to change significantly from time to time.
Version 2.5 should be ready within 6 months I presume.
Honorable mention is the Akka-Streams, which has a framework attached to it:
Akka. That means you would be at the mercy of the actor system most of the
time, not to mention, its architecture has a ton of mandatory async boundaries
that lower performance considerably.
I wouldn't recommend writing your own RS library. Writing correct,
backpressure-enabled operators is 1-2 orders of magnitude more complicated than
the complication of the steep learning curve of RxJava.
In conclusion, if you can wait a few months before work is started on this, you
can use Reactor for the internal implementation and expose the functionalities
as standard RS interface(s).
If you have questions about reactive topics (I don't know or use Cassandra
btw), let me know.
> Proposal: Integrate RxJava
> --------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-10528
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10528
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Reporter: T Jake Luciani
> Assignee: T Jake Luciani
> Fix For: 3.x
>
> Attachments: rxjava-stress.png
>
>
> The purpose of this ticket is to discuss the merits of integrating the
> [RxJava|https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava] framework into C*. Enabling us
> to incrementally make the internals of C* async and move away from SEDA to a
> more modern thread per core architecture.
> Related tickets:
> * CASSANDRA-8520
> * CASSANDRA-8457
> * CASSANDRA-5239
> * CASSANDRA-7040
> * CASSANDRA-5863
> * CASSANDRA-6696
> * CASSANDRA-7392
> My *primary* goals in raising this issue are to provide a way of:
> * *Incrementally* making the backend async
> * Avoiding code complexity/readability issues
> * Avoiding NIH where possible
> * Building on an extendable library
> My *non*-goals in raising this issue are:
>
> * Rewrite the entire database in one big bang
> * Write our own async api/framework
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I've attempted to integrate RxJava a while back and found it not ready mainly
> due to our lack of lambda support. Now with Java 8 I've found it very
> enjoyable and have not hit any performance issues. A gentle introduction to
> RxJava is [here|http://blog.danlew.net/2014/09/15/grokking-rxjava-part-1/] as
> well as their
> [wiki|https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/wiki/Additional-Reading]. The
> primary concept of RX is the
> [Obervable|http://reactivex.io/documentation/observable.html] which is
> essentially a stream of stuff you can subscribe to and act on, chain, etc.
> This is quite similar to [Java 8 streams
> api|http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/ma14-java-se-8-streams-2177646.html]
> (or I should say streams api is similar to it). The difference is java 8
> streams can't be used for asynchronous events while RxJava can.
> Another improvement since I last tried integrating RxJava is the completion
> of CASSANDRA-8099 which provides is a very iterable/incremental approach to
> our storage engine. *Iterators and Observables are well paired conceptually
> so morphing our current Storage engine to be async is much simpler now.*
> In an effort to show how one can incrementally change our backend I've done a
> quick POC with RxJava and replaced our non-paging read requests to become
> non-blocking.
> https://github.com/apache/cassandra/compare/trunk...tjake:rxjava-3.0
> As you can probably see the code is straight-forward and sometimes quite nice!
> *Old*
> {code}
> private static PartitionIterator
> fetchRows(List<SinglePartitionReadCommand<?>> commands, ConsistencyLevel
> consistencyLevel)
> throws UnavailableException, ReadFailureException, ReadTimeoutException
> {
> int cmdCount = commands.size();
> SinglePartitionReadLifecycle[] reads = new
> SinglePartitionReadLifecycle[cmdCount];
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> reads[i] = new SinglePartitionReadLifecycle(commands.get(i),
> consistencyLevel);
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> reads[i].doInitialQueries();
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> reads[i].maybeTryAdditionalReplicas();
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> reads[i].awaitRes
> ultsAndRetryOnDigestMismatch();
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> if (!reads[i].isDone())
> reads[i].maybeAwaitFullDataRead();
> List<PartitionIterator> results = new ArrayList<>(cmdCount);
> for (int i = 0; i < cmdCount; i++)
> {
> assert reads[i].isDone();
> results.add(reads[i].getResult());
> }
> return PartitionIterators.concat(results);
> }
> {code}
> *New*
> {code}
> private static Observable<PartitionIterator>
> fetchRows(List<SinglePartitionReadCommand<?>> commands, ConsistencyLevel
> consistencyLevel)
> throws UnavailableException, ReadFailureException, ReadTimeoutException
> {
> return Observable.from(commands)
> .map(command -> new
> SinglePartitionReadLifecycle(command, consistencyLevel))
> .flatMap(read -> read.getPartitionIterator())
> .toList()
> .map(results -> PartitionIterators.concat(results));
> }
> {code}
> Since the read call is now non blocking (no more future.get()) we can remove
> one thread pool hop from the native netty request pool which yields a
> non-trivial improvement to read performance.
> !rxjava-stress.png|width=800px!
> http://cstar.datastax.com/tests/id/ae648c12-729a-11e5-8625-0256e416528f
> At the same time the current Iterator based api still works by calling
> {{.toBlocking()}} on the observable. So for example the existing thrift read
> call requires little modification
> On the async side we get the added benefits of RxJava:
> * Customizable backpressure strategies (for dealing with streams that can't
> be processed quickly enough)
> * Cancelling of work due to timeouts is a 1 line change
> * When a Subscriber disconnects from the stream they Observable stops as
> well
> * Batching/windowing of work can be added in one line
> * Observers and Subscribers can do work across any thread at any stage of
> the pipeline
> * Observables can be [debugged|https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJavaDebug]
> and
> [tested|http://reactivex.io/RxJava/javadoc/rx/observers/TestSubscriber.html]
> Another plus is the community surrounding RxJava specifically our good
> friends at netflix have authored and used it extensively. Docs and examples
> are good.
> In order to get the most out of this we will need to take this api further
> into the code. MessagingService, Disk Access/Page, Cache, Thread per core...
> but again I want to hammer home this will be able to be achieved
> incrementally.
> On the bad side this is:
> * Locking into a "framework"
> * Will inevitably hit bugs / performance issues we need fixed upstream
> * Some of the more advanced API uses look pretty mentally taxing/hard to
> grasp
> Which brings us to the Alternatives, primarily being to just use
> CompletableFutures.
> We certainly could but if you look at the code changes I had to make to make
> the SP calls asynchronous I think you will realize you would need to pass
> all kinds of state around to get the read command callback to start the netty
> write. Vs observables which make that pipeline declarative. Also more
> advanced things like backpressure and message passing between N:M producers
> and consumers becomes complex. This isn't to say we can't [use
> both|http://www.nurkiewicz.com/2014/11/converting-between-completablefuture.html]
> if Observables are overkill.
> I hope this ticket sparks some good discussion!
>
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