Hi folks,
I thought I'd poll the list on the best way to approach a problem in
Twisted.
The background is that we have a number of resources which can be
requested by a REST client, and which are calculated on demand. The
calculation is moderately expensive (can take multiple seconds), so the
results of the calculation are cached so multiple lookups of the same
resource are more efficient.
The problem comes in trying to handle multiple clients requesting the
same resource at once. Obviously if 200 clients all request the same
resource at the same time, we don't want to fire off 200 calculation
requests.
The approach we adopted was, effectively, to maintain a lock for each
resource:
lock = defer.DeferredLock()
cached_result = None
@defer.inlineCallbacks
def getResource():
yield lock.acquire()
try:
if cached_result is None:
cached_result = yield do_expensive_calculation()
defer.returnValue(cached_result)
finally:
lock.release()
(Of course one can optimise the above to avoid getting the lock if we
already have the cached result - I've omitted that for simplicity.)
That's all very well, but it falls down when we get more than about 200
requests for the same resource: once the calculation completes, we can
suddenly serve all the requests, and the Deferreds returned by
DeferredLock end up chaining together in a way that overflows the stack.
I reported this as http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/9304 and, at the
time, worked around it by adding a call to reactor.callLater(0) into our
implementation. However, Jean-Paul's comments on that bug implied that
we were approaching the problem in completely the wrong way, and instead
we should be avoiding queuing up work like this in the first place.
It's worth reiterating that the requests arrive from REST clients which
we have no direct control over. We *could* keep track of the number of
waiting clients, and make the API respond with a 5xx error or similar if
that number gets too high, with the expectation that the client retries
- but one concern would be that the load from the additional HTTP
traffic would outweigh any efficiency gained by not stacking up Deferreds.
So, I'd welcome any advice on better ways to approach the problem.
Richard
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