So You Want to Optimize gRPC - Part 1

By Carl Mastrangelo (Google) | Tuesday, March 06, 2018

A common question with gRPC is how to make it fast. The gRPC library offers users access to high performance RPCs, but it isn’t always clear how to achieve this. Because this question is common enough I thought I would try to show my thought process when tuning programs.

Setup

Consider a basic key-value service that is used by multiple other programs. The service needs to be safe for concurrent access in case multiple updates happen at the same time. It needs to be able to scale up to use the available hardware. Lastly, it needs to be fast. gRPC is a perfect fit for this type of service; let’s look at the best way to implement it.

For this blog post, I have written an example client and server using gRPC Java. The program is split into three main classes, and a protobuf file describing the API:

KvClient is a simulated user of the key value system. It randomly creates, retrieves, updates, and deletes keys and values. The size of keys and values it uses is also randomly decided using an exponential distribution.
KvService is an implementation of the key value service. It is installed by the gRPC Server to handle the requests issued by the client. To simulate storing the keys and values on disk, it adds short sleeps while handling the request. Reads and writes will experience a 10 and 50 millisecond delay to make the example act more like a persistent database.
KvRunner orchestrates the interaction between the client and the server. It is the main entry point, starting both the client and server in process, and waiting for the the client to execute its work. The runner does work for 60 seconds and then records how many RPCs were completed.
kvstore.proto is the protocol buffer definition of our service. It describes exactly what clients can expect from the service. For the sake of simplicity, we will use Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete as the operations (commonly known as CRUD). These operations work with keys and values made up of arbitrary bytes. While they are somewhat REST like, we reserve the right to diverge and add more complex operations in the future.

Protocol buffers (protos) aren’t required to use gRPC, they are a very convenient way to define service interfaces and generate client and server code. The generated code acts as glue code between the application logic and the core gRPC library. We refer to the code called by a gRPC client the stub.

Starting Point

Client

Now that we know what the program should do, we can start looking at how the program performs. As mentioned above, the client makes random RPCs. For example, here is the code that makes the creation request:

private void doCreate(KeyValueServiceBlockingStub stub) {
  ByteString key = createRandomKey();
  try {
    CreateResponse res = stub.create(
        CreateRequest.newBuilder()
            .setKey(key)
            .setValue(randomBytes(MEAN_VALUE_SIZE))
            .build());
    if (!res.equals(CreateResponse.getDefaultInstance())) {
      throw new RuntimeException("Invalid response");
    }
  } catch (StatusRuntimeException e) {
    if (e.getStatus().getCode() == Code.ALREADY_EXISTS) {
      knownKeys.remove(key);
      logger.log(Level.INFO, "Key already existed", e);
    } else {
      throw e;
    }
  }
}

A random key is created, along with a random value. The request is sent to the server, and the client waits for the response. When the response is returned, the code checks that it is as expected, and if not, throws an exception. While the keys are chosen randomly, they need to be unique, so we need to make sure that each key isn’t already in use. To address this, the code keeps track of keys it has created, so as not to create the same key twice. However, it’s possible that another client already created a particular key, so we log it and move on. Otherwise, an exception is thrown.

We use the blocking gRPC API here, which issues a requests and waits for a response. This is the simplest gRPC stub, but it blocks the thread while running. This means that at most one RPC can be in progress at a time from the client’s point of view.

Server

On the server side, the request is received by the service handler:

private final Map<ByteBuffer, ByteBuffer> store = new HashMap<>();

@Override
public synchronized void create(
    CreateRequest request, StreamObserver<CreateResponse> responseObserver) {
  ByteBuffer key = request.getKey().asReadOnlyByteBuffer();
  ByteBuffer value = request.getValue().asReadOnlyByteBuffer();
  simulateWork(WRITE_DELAY_MILLIS);
  if (store.putIfAbsent(key, value) == null) {
    responseObserver.onNext(CreateResponse.getDefaultInstance());
    responseObserver.onCompleted();
    return;
  }
  responseObserver.onError(Status.ALREADY_EXISTS.asRuntimeException());
}

The service extracts the key and value as ByteBuffers from the request. It acquires the lock on the service itself to make sure concurrent requests don’t corrupt the storage. After simulating the disk access of a write, it stores it in the Map of keys to values.

Unlike the client code, the service handler is non-blocking, meaning it doesn’t return a value like a function call would. Instead, it invokes onNext() on the responseObserver to send the response back to the client. Note that this call is also non-blocking, meaning that the message may not yet have been sent. To indicate we are done with the message, onCompleted() is called.

Performance

Since the code is safe and correct, let’s see how it performs. For my measurement I’m using my Ubuntu system with a 12 core processor and 32 GB of memory. Let’s build and run the code:

./gradlew installDist
time ./build/install/kvstore/bin/kvstore
Feb 26, 2018 1:10:07 PM io.grpc.examples.KvRunner runClient
INFO: Starting
Feb 26, 2018 1:11:07 PM io.grpc.examples.KvRunner runClient
INFO: Did 16.55 RPCs/s

real	1m0.927s
user	0m10.688s
sys	0m1.456s

Yikes! For such a powerful machine, it can only do about 16 RPCs per second. It hardly used any of our CPU, and we don’t know how much memory it was using. We need to figure out why it’s so slow.

Optimization

Analysis

Let’s understand what the program is doing before we make any changes. When optimizing, we need to know where the code is spending its time in order to know what we can optimize. At this early stage, we don’t need profiling tools yet, we can just reason about the program.

The client is started and serially issues RPCs for about a minute. Each iteration, it randomly decides what operation to do:

void doClientWork(AtomicBoolean done) {
  Random random = new Random();
  KeyValueServiceBlockingStub stub = KeyValueServiceGrpc.newBlockingStub(channel);

  while (!done.get()) {
    // Pick a random CRUD action to take.
    int command = random.nextInt(4);
    if (command == 0) {
      doCreate(stub);
      continue;
    }
    /* ... */
    rpcCount++;
  }
}

This means that at most one RPC can be active at any time. Each RPC has to wait for the previous one to complete. And how long does each RPC take to complete? From reading the server code, most of the operations are doing a write which takes about 50 milliseconds. At top efficiency, the most operations this code can do per second is about 20:

20 queries = 1000ms / (50 ms / query)

Our code can do about 16 queries in a second, so that seems about right. We can spot check this assumption by looking at the output of the time command used to run the code. The server goes to sleep when running queries in the simulateWork method. This implies that the program should be mostly idle while waiting for the RPCs to complete.

We can confirm this is the case by looking at the real and user times of the command above. They say that the amount of wall clock time was 1 minute, while the amount of cpu time was 10 seconds. My powerful, multicore CPU was only busy 16% of the time. Thus, if we could get the program to do more work during that time, it seems like we could get more RPCs complete.

Hypothesis

Now we can state clearly what we think is the problem, and propose a solution. One way to speed up programs is to make sure the CPU is not idling. To do this, we issue work concurrently.

In gRPC Java, there are three types of stubs: blocking, non-blocking, and listenable future. We have already seen the blocking stub in the client, and the non-blocking stub in the server. The listenable future API is a compromise between the two, offering both blocking and non-blocking like behavior. As long as we don’t block a thread waiting for work to complete, we can start new RPCs without waiting for the old ones to complete.

Experiment

To test our hypothesis, let’s modify the client code to use the listenable future API. This means that we need to think more about concurrency in our code. For example, when keeping track of known keys client-side, we need to safely read, modify, and write the keys. We also need to make sure that in case of an error, we stop making new RPCs (proper error handling will be covered in a future post). Lastly, we need to update the number of RPCs made concurrently, since the update could happen in another thread.

Making all these changes increases the complexity of the code. This is a trade off you will need to consider when optimizing your code. In general, code simplicity is at odds with optimization. Java is not known for being terse. That said, the code below is still readable, and program flow is still roughly from top to bottom in the function. Here is the doCreate() method revised:

private void doCreate(KeyValueServiceFutureStub stub, AtomicReference<Throwable> error) {
  ByteString key = createRandomKey();
  ListenableFuture<CreateResponse> res = stub.create(
      CreateRequest.newBuilder()
          .setKey(key)
          .setValue(randomBytes(MEAN_VALUE_SIZE))
          .build());
  res.addListener(() -> rpcCount.incrementAndGet(), MoreExecutors.directExecutor());
  Futures.addCallback(res, new FutureCallback<CreateResponse>() {
    @Override
    public void onSuccess(CreateResponse result) {
      if (!result.equals(CreateResponse.getDefaultInstance())) {
        error.compareAndSet(null, new RuntimeException("Invalid response"));
      }
      synchronized (knownKeys) {
        knownKeys.add(key);
      }
    }

    @Override
    public void onFailure(Throwable t) {
      Status status = Status.fromThrowable(t);
      if (status.getCode() == Code.ALREADY_EXISTS) {
        synchronized (knownKeys) {
          knownKeys.remove(key);
        }
        logger.log(Level.INFO, "Key already existed", t);
      } else {
        error.compareAndSet(null, t);
      }
    }
  });
}

The stub has been modified to be a KeyValueServiceFutureStub, which produces a Future when called instead of the response itself. gRPC Java uses an extension of this called ListenableFuture, which allows adding a callback when the future completes. For the sake of this program, we are not as concerned with getting the response. Instead we care more if the RPC succeeded or not. With that in mind, the code mainly checks for errors rather than processing the response.

The first change made is how the number of RPCs is recorded. Instead of incrementing the counter outside of the main loop, we increment it when the RPC completes.

Next, we create a new object for each RPC which handles both the success and failure cases. Because doCreate() will already be completed by the time RPC callback is invoked, we need a way to propagate errors other than by throwing. Instead, we try to update an reference atomically. The main loop will occasionally check if an error has occurred and stop if there is a problem.

Lastly, the code is careful to only add a key to knownKeys when the RPC is actually complete, and only remove it when known to have failed. We synchronize on the variable to make sure two threads don’t conflict. Note: although the access to knownKeys is threadsafe, there are still race conditions. It is possible that one thread could read from knownKeys, a second thread delete from knownKeys, and then the first thread issue an RPC using the first key. Synchronizing on the keys only ensures that it is consistent, not that it is correct. Fixing this properly is outside of the scope of this post, so instead we just log the event and move on. You will see a few such log statements if you run this program.

Running the Code

If you start up this program and run it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t work:

WARNING: An exception was thrown by io.grpc.netty.NettyClientStream$Sink$1.operationComplete()
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread
	at java.lang.Thread.start0(Native Method)
	at java.lang.Thread.start(Thread.java:714)
	...

What?! Why would I show you code that fails? The reason is that in real life making a change often doesn’t work on the first try. In this case, the program ran out of memory. Odd things begin to happen when a program runs out of memory. Often, the root cause is hard to find, and red herrings abound. A confusing error message says “unable to create new native thread” even though we didn’t create any new threads in our code. Experience is very helpful in fixing these problems rather than debugging. Since I have debugged many OOMs, I happen to know Java tells us about the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our program started using way more memory, but the final allocation that failed happened, by chance, to be in thread creation.

So what happened? There was no pushback to starting new RPCs. In the blocking version, a new RPC couldn’t start until the last one completed. While slow, it also prevented us from creating tons of RPCs that we didn’t have memory for. We need to account for this in the listenable future version.

To solve this, we can apply a self-imposed limit on the number of active RPCs. Before starting a new RPC, we will try to acquire a permit. If we get one, the RPC can start. If not, we will wait until one is available. When an RPC completes (either in success or failure), we return the permit. To accomplish this, we will using a Semaphore:

private final Semaphore limiter = new Semaphore(100);

private void doCreate(KeyValueServiceFutureStub stub, AtomicReference<Throwable> error)
    throws InterruptedException {
  limiter.acquire();
  ByteString key = createRandomKey();
  ListenableFuture<CreateResponse> res = stub.create(
      CreateRequest.newBuilder()
          .setKey(key)
          .setValue(randomBytes(MEAN_VALUE_SIZE))
          .build());
  res.addListener(() ->  {
    rpcCount.incrementAndGet();
    limiter.release();
  }, MoreExecutors.directExecutor());
  /* ... */
}

Now the code runs successfully, and doesn’t run out of memory.

Results

Building and running the code again looks a lot better:

./gradlew installDist
time ./build/install/kvstore/bin/kvstore
Feb 26, 2018 2:40:47 PM io.grpc.examples.KvRunner runClient
INFO: Starting
Feb 26, 2018 2:41:47 PM io.grpc.examples.KvRunner runClient
INFO: Did 24.283 RPCs/s

real	1m0.923s
user	0m12.772s
sys	0m1.572s

Our code does 46% more RPCs per second than previously. We can also see that we used about 20% more CPU than previously. As we can see our hypothesis turned out to be correct and the fix worked. All this happened without making any changes to the server. Also, we were able to measure without using any special profilers or tracers.

Do the numbers make sense? We expect to issue mutation (create, update, and delete) RPCs each about with 1/4 probability. Reads are also issue 1/4 of the time, but don’t take as long. The mean RPC time should be about the weighted average RPC time:

  .25 * 50ms (create)
  .25 * 10ms (retrieve)
  .25 * 50ms (update)
 +.25 * 50ms (delete)
------------
        40ms

At 40ms on average per RPC, we would expect the number of RPCs per second to be:

25 queries = 1000ms / (40 ms / query)

That’s approximately what we see with the new code. The server is still serially handling requests, so it seems like we have more work to do in the future. But for now, our optimizations seem to have worked.

Conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities to optimize your gRPC code. To take advantage of these, you need to understand what your code is doing, and what your code is supposed to do. This post shows the very basics of how to approach and think about optimization. Always make sure to measure before and after your changes, and use these measurements to guide your optimizations.

In Part 2, we will continue optimizing the server part of the code.

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