* the original controversy was about whether it's better to let slow HTTP requests block things or stack up in an async context, and the contention was that it doesn't much matter either way and that the difference won't be too big.
TL;DR: The difference isn't only big, it's enough to make the OP's proposed scenario work. Using the sample code I listed above, I tested this at 750 INVITEs/second using a minimal number of listener processes in docker on WSL2 in the background of my laptop while I did my other work (far from an ideal). Yes, I had to bump the shared memory up to 1 GB. And that is high, but it's far more sane than 750 listener processes. At one point in time, there was a problem with the http connection to the http service, but this didn't cause any type of crash or unmanagable event. For a variety of reasons, I'd probably look to implement two of these redirect servers in the real world and balance requests between the two. [ben@NV0162~/projects/AAA_examples/kamailio/http_async]$ dc exec kamailio kamcmd ps 1 main process - attendant 7 udp receiver child=0 sock=127.0.0.1:5060 8 udp receiver child=1 sock=127.0.0.1:5060 9 udp receiver child=0 sock=172.23.0.2:5060 10 udp receiver child=1 sock=172.23.0.2:5060 11 slow timer 12 timer 13 secondary timer 14 Http Async Worker 15 ctl handler 16 tcp receiver (generic) child=0 17 tcp receiver (generic) child=1 18 tcp main process [cid:fc4b45d6-ef07-4d63-ad78-39bfb8404f2e] Less than 1% failure rate to the UA, under far from ideal conditions, with no re-attempts, etc. Kaufman Senior Voice Engineer E: [email protected] SIP.US Client Support: 800.566.9810 | SIPTRUNK Client Support: 800.250.6510 | Flowroute Client Support: 855.356.9768 [img]<https://www.sip.us/> [img]<https://www.siptrunk.com/> [img]<https://www.flowroute.com/> ________________________________ From: Alex Balashov via sr-users <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 23, 2024 11:17 AM To: Kamailio - Users Mailing List <[email protected]> Cc: Alex Balashov <[email protected]> Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Kamailio not receiving packets on high CPS CAUTION: This email originated from outside the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. The http_async_client event loop is a better performer, for sure. But the original controversy was about whether it's better to let slow HTTP requests block things or stack up in an async context, and the contention was that it doesn't much matter either way and that the difference won't be too big. You just can't have a slow HTTP API. The beauty of EVAPI is that there's no query, no new connection, and no event loop beyond normal TCP socket multiplexing. — Sent from mobile, apologies for brevity and errors. On Dec 23, 2024, at 12:10 PM, Ben Kaufman <[email protected]> wrote: We're agreed on creating a dedicated redirect server for this process, I'm not sure I agree on the need to ramp up processes on this, when the tradeoff of holding the transaction in shared memory while waiting for an http response exists. To be sure, you're trading increased shared memory vs increased package memory, but there's frequently other considerations as well. In situations like this, I find that I'm doing a database dip, etc. in addition to the http request . Adding more workers adds more DB connections, unnecessarily increasing memory consumption. I'd go so far as to say that the older http_client generally shouldn't be used. If you have very infrequent http requests to execute and want to use it because it's syntactically easier then it might make sense, but beyond that it only offers lesser performance. Honestly, this thread has mostly devolved to two points: 1. Should HTTP requests ever be used: I think we're all agreed that they're not ideal. **HOW** not ideal they are and how much we can force other things to use an alternate process remain. 2. When making http requests, which module should be used. Without hesitation I would say to use http_async_query for the performance gain. Kaufman Senior Voice Engineer E: [email protected] SIP.US Client Support: 800.566.9810 | SIPTRUNK Client Support: 800.250.6510 | Flowroute Client Support: 855.356.9768 [img]<https://www.sip.us/> [img]<https://www.siptrunk.com/> [img]<https://www.flowroute.com/> ________________________________ From: Alex Balashov via sr-users <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 23, 2024 10:51 AM To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List <[email protected]> Cc: Alex Balashov <[email protected]> Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Kamailio not receiving packets on high CPS CAUTION: This email originated from outside the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. One additional thought -- sorry for the numerous messages: This discussion has got a little too academic. When talking about concurrency, it's important to ask what the workload actually is and how parallelisable it is. 1) All these async tricks are most useful when you have a busy Kamailio server that does lots of different kinds of things. Freeing up worker processes becomes an important objective, because not blocking them with these requests allows them to handle those requests and those other replies. 2) The other important consideration is locking: how much are shared-memory structures (transaction state, dialog state, htables, etc) being accessed by multiple worker processes? These issues are typical of Kamailio-based multiservice SIP gateways that perform functions like call routing, registration, presence, etc. all in one system. Purpose-built redirect servers that query an HTTP API have a trivial and one-track workload. They receive an INVITE, it's allocated to a worker, the worker goes and bangs on an HTTP server, gets a response, and sends it back to the callee. There are no other requests to juggle, save for the incidental OPTIONS ping maybe, there are no SIP replies to process and relay, and nothing else to do except to absorb ACKs (if the redirects are sent statefully). Along the way, vanishingly little is being accessed apart from transaction memory (if stateful), and concurrent accesses to that are fast because the locks are pretty granular. Thus, this type of workload doesn't benefit from general-purpose throughput optimisations much. The proper approach, using whichever HTTP client module, is to spin up as many child processes as can be spun up without diminishing returns, and just dedicating them to that singular function while studiously avoiding lockable shared data (e.g. htable). This keeps all the cars mostly in their own lanes, and the success or failure of that per se will dictate throughput. -- Alex > On Dec 23, 2024, at 11:25 am, Alex Balashov <[email protected]> wrote: > > PS. A key selling point of this is that if the TCP client crashes or becomes > unavailable, the transaction just times out after a while, instead of any > Kamailio worker processes shitting themselves or blocking because they're > unable to connect to something. There's nothing to connect to. > > This alone sold me. Once you go EVAPI, you can't go back. > > -- Alex > >> On Dec 23, 2024, at 11:23 am, Alex Balashov <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> >>> On Dec 23, 2024, at 10:56 am, Ben Kaufman via sr-users >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> This came off a bit more harsh than I intended. I think I understand the >>> advantage of EVAPI in that it can initiate a command to Kamailio (thus >>> Kamailio doesn't need to hold the thread, possibly it doesn't need to store >>> the message even), but it would still be nice to have a higher level >>> overview of how this would be achieved. Not even example code, but more a >>> base architecture explanation / diagram of the flow. >> >> It's probably not complicated enough to warrant a diagram. >> >> 1) EVAPI server is initialised: >> >> loadmodule "evapi" >> modparam("evapi", "workers", 3) >> modparam("evapi", "bind_addr", "xxx:10399") >> >> 2) TCP client connects to this socket when it becomes available; >> >> 2) Kamailio receives request and serialises it (e.g. JSON), embedding the >> transaction ID and label in whatever serialisation structure is used, then >> emits it on the EVAPI bus, e.g. >> >> >> evapi_async_relay("invite_request:$T(id_index):$T(id_label):$(var(data){s.encode.base64})"); >> >> 3) TCP client reads this package off the wire; the built-in netstring >> support is ideal. It then processes it, generates a response, serialises it, >> and puts it back on the wire. Vitally, the $T(id_index) and $T(id_label) are >> embedded in the response, allowing Kamailio to resume the transaction: >> >> 4) Kamailio receives this message in $evapi(msg), in this event_route, and >> resumes the transaction into route[RESUME]: >> >> event_route[evapi:message-received] { >> ... >> jansson_get("tm_trans.tm_index", "$evapi(msg)", "$var(t_index)"); >> jansson_get("tm_trans.tm_label", "$evapi(msg)", "$var(t_label)"); >> >> t_continue("$var(t_index)", "$var(t_label)", "RESUME"); >> >> ... >> } >> >> 5) In route[RESUME], INVITE processing continues as normal, enlightened by >> anything else that was deserialised out of $evapi(msg). >> >> EVAPI is my favourite Kamailio module, and the only way I interface with >> outside services, when it's up to me. >> >> -- Alex >> >> -- >> Alex Balashov >> Principal Consultant >> Evariste Systems LLC >> Web: >> https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fevaristesys.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cbkaufman%40bcmone.com%7C36599b935f8749f6887008dd2372e98b%7Cafc1818e7b6848568913201b9396c4fc%7C1%7C0%7C638705698656233126%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=2yJfCA8sIC37%2FrMQebYxYUK2YftzJ1ZBWkWA%2FSCt1ck%3D&reserved=0<https://evaristesys.com/> >> Tel: +1-706-510-6800 >> > > -- > Alex Balashov > Principal Consultant > Evariste Systems LLC > Web: > https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fevaristesys.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cbkaufman%40bcmone.com%7C36599b935f8749f6887008dd2372e98b%7Cafc1818e7b6848568913201b9396c4fc%7C1%7C0%7C638705698656254563%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=F39ZiuWvpbPrqWpniUhQmPKFbhLEFFtgQuXHOaHEdl4%3D&reserved=0<https://evaristesys.com/> > Tel: +1-706-510-6800 > -- Alex Balashov Principal Consultant Evariste Systems LLC Web: https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fevaristesys.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cbkaufman%40bcmone.com%7C36599b935f8749f6887008dd2372e98b%7Cafc1818e7b6848568913201b9396c4fc%7C1%7C0%7C638705698656272188%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=enmSM1XRjVMIk9j2TT5Gw5Co9Iq63ZN9GLpWHOAsC8g%3D&reserved=0<https://evaristesys.com/> Tel: +1-706-510-6800 __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
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