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IOQ2 Overview

IOQ2 is a replacement for the original IOQ, with the core motivation to create a faster IOQ that eliminates the need for IOQ bypasses. This is achieved with two primary approaches:

  1. Faster data structures
  2. More processes

IOQ2 also provides a more capable configuration system allowing (de)prioritization at the class, user, and shard/class levels. This means you can do things like bumping up global compaction priority, deprioritizing a problematic MT user, and bumping up view build priority on an individual shard.

Faster Data Structures

One of the issues with IOQ1 is that it uses standard Erlang list and queue data structures for doing high volume modifications to the request queues and tracking of active requests. This quickly becomes a bottleneck, and results in IOQ1 being roughly an order of magnitude slower than bypassing it, in high throughput scenarios.

We work around this issue in IOQ2 by introducing the hqueue data structure, which is an Erlang NIF wrapper around a simple mutable priority queue that only does in place updates. This queue is minimal in functionality and only supports floating point values as the priority sorting mechanism. The result is that IOQ2 focuses on a multiplicative prioritization scheme using chained multipliers allowing for different weights to classes, users, and shard/class pairs. This prioritization scheme can easily be extended later on to include additional attributes, such as CCM tier, or perhaps a feedback loop providing prioritization on overall request volumes/cost per user.

More Processes

The introduction of hqueue has a considerable impact on IOQ and more than doubles the throughput of IOQ1, however, as mentioned above, IOQ1 bypasses can result in an order of magnitude performance difference, so clearly faster data structures are not sufficient to solve the problem. The main issue is that an Erlang process can only go as fast a single CPU core will allow, so as we continually add more CPU cores to production systems, single process IOQ becomes even more of a problem.

Having all requests funnel through a single Erlang process will inevitably become a bottleneck. That said, the entire point of IOQ is that it IS a bottleneck! If there's no queued requests, then there's nothing to prioritize, making the use of IOQ questionable at best. The balancing act here is getting as close to IOQ bypass performance as we can while inducing enough of a bottleneck to effectively be able to prioritize different types of work.

IOQ2 uses a set of IOQ2 processes to achieve similar levels of performance as an IOQ bypass. It creates a set of named ioq_server_$N processes for each Erlang scheduler in the VM. The caller requests are then dispatched to the appropriate IOQ2 server based on the current scheduler of the caller. Overall this works quite well and seems to be an effective way of ensuring sufficient request volume to have a queue backlog to prioritize, while also spreading out load as the Erlang spreads load out across more schedulers, as needed. There is an experimental option to bind the IOQ2 pids to the relevant schedulers, but so far this has not shown conclusive improvements during limited testing. Another potential approach here is to randomize requests to the different IOQ2 pids. More fine grained testing with a sharp eye on latency distributions would be useful here.

The (h)queue

The new queue in IOQ2 is the hqueue NIF, which is a mutable heap based max priority queue that prioritizes on a single floating point value. What this means in practice is that every request gets a numeric floating point priority value, and is then thrown into the queue until is is popped as the max value. The result is a priority queue data structure that inserts new items in O(log(N)) and also extracts the maximum item in O(log(N)), resulting in a very performant data structure for the application at hand.

Sample Prioritizations

The current prioritization scheme is a simple set of multipliers for the various dimensions. Currently there are three dimensions:

  • Class: eg interactive, db_compact, view_update, etc
  • User: the user making the request, eg <<"foo">>
  • Shard/Class pair: the shard and class for the request
    • eg {<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>, interactive}
    • this allows for things like increased compaction priority on an individual shard outside of the global class multipliers

Behind the scenes, this basically works as follows:

prioritize_request(Req) ->
  UserPriority = user_priority(Req),
  ClassPriority = class_priority(Req),
  ShardClassPriority = shard_class_priority(Req),

  UserPriority * ClassPriority * ShardClassPriority.

With the default priority being the identity priority, 1.0, so in the case where no values are defined the multiplier above would be 1.0 * 1.0 * 1.0. The default class priorities are currently defined as follows in ioq.hrl:

Default Class Priorities

-define(DEFAULT_CLASS_PRIORITIES, [
    {customer, 1.0},
    {internal_repl, 0.001},
    {view_compact, 0.0001},
    {db_compact, 0.0001},
    {low, 0.0001},
    {db_meta, 1.0},

    {db_update, 1.0},
    {view_update, 1.0},
    {other, 1.0},
    {interactive, 1.0}
]).

Handling Priority Starvation

One potential problem with the simple floating point based priority queue is that lower priority items can become starved given a constant volume of higher priority requests. We want to ensure that requests can't get permanently starved in this manner, and that work progresses on all fronts in a timely fashion. IOQ1 handles this issue by ensuring there's always a random chance low priority work will be executed.

In IOQ2 this issue is handled by way of an auto scaling elevator on the priority values. What this means is that every N requests, IOQ2 will scale the existing queued items by a configurable scaling factor. The idea is that you automatically increase the priority of all queued items, and if you do that enough times then lower priority items will eventually bubble up to the top. Behind the scenes hqueue is an array based heap so we can easily run through the array and update the priority of each item. By scaling the priority of each item linearly, we preserve the loop invariant sorted order of the elements in the heap and can accomplish this without needing to resort the heap.

The default scale factor is currently 2.0, and the default N value for how often to scale is currently every 1000 requests. Both of these values are config knobs. In general these values seem ok, but they're not particularly scientific, so we'll want to keep an eye on them over time in a variety of workloads.

Intentional Priority Starvation

Initially, IOQ2 and hqueue required all priorities to be greater than zero, but this has been switched to be greater than or equal to zero. The motivation here is that 0.0 has the cute property of propagating through any multipliers. This means a zero value for any of the dimensions will make the other dimensions irrelevant. But what's even more interesting is that zero priority values skip the auto scaling elevator and will forever be stuck at zero, which provides a way to intentionally starve particular work types, or at the very least to ensure that it will never be selected unless there is no other work to do. This is especially useful for black balling problematic MT users, or marking a particular database as background only work.


IOQ2 Operations Guide

IOQ2 comes with a feature toggle, and is disabled by default. You can enable it with:

Enable IOQ2

ioq_config:set_enabled(true, "Enabling IOQ2").

You can verify it's enabled by checking:

ioq:ioq2_enabled().

Metrics Dashboard

IOQ2 has a dedicated dashboard page on metrics.cloudant.com with the expected tab name of IOQ2.


Choosing Good Priority Values

Choosing good priority values is going to be a crucial part of tuning IOQ2. Unfortunately this is not particularly obvious nor necessarily easy, and it will take some experimentation under different workloads to begin establishing some best practices. Hopefully folks can start updating this section with some useful tips and tricks for different workloads. Below there's more documentation on how to validate the priority configs for different request types. The primary motivation for adding that logic was to help facilitate experimentation of different configuration options, and to aid in understanding how the different configurations impact request prioritization.

It will be useful to keep in mind the ranges of priority values. By default all interactive/view_update/db_update/other class requests have a priority of 1.0, and assuming no user specific or shard specific configs, those requests will have a priority of 1.0. Similarly, standard background tasks like compaction and internal replication have a default priority of 0.0001. So primary database operations by default have a thousand fold prioritization over background tasks. The default bounds of prioritization are from 0.0 to 10000.0, so you have a decent field to experiment with, and the upper bound can be configured higher or lower as desired.

It's also important to remember the auto scaling elevator logic for prioritized requests. Every N requests all currently queued requests have their priorities linearly scaled, so after sufficiently long time in the queue, all requests (with non 0.0 priorities) will eventually become the top priority (assuming constant priorities coming in). The scaling factor can be configured as well as how often to do the scaling.

So let's look at some real world scenarios where you would want to change prioritization. Let's start with a simple one, what to do when a node is at 95% disk space? This is an easy one! just blast compaction priority. Unlike IOQ1, IOQ2 does not differeniate between request types in terms of selecting next work, it's strictly based on the priority multiplier, so you can completely prioritize compaction traffic over standard database operations, potentially to the detriment of standard operations performance. So if you set the compaction priority multiplier to 10000 you'll prioritize compaction work above everything else (assuming default priorities elsewhere). This means that as long as there is compaction jobs in the queue those will be handled before anything else. This should be a significant win for prioritizing compaction in low disk space scenarios.

Now, let's look at a similar, albeit more complicated scenario. Disk space is above 85%, and you want to get out ahead of the compaction curve without severely impacting cluster performance for standard operations. Cranking compaction to the limit will get the job done, but it will also potentially induce performance issues for the customer and could starve normal requests. Here you would want to experiment a bit with gradually bumping up the compaction priority. Try going from the 0.0001 default to 0.001 and see how much that increases compaction throughput. Still not enough? try 0.01 and repeat. Then on to 0.1 and maybe even on to 1.0 to make compaction priority level with normal operations.

One other thing to keep in mind here is that these prioritizations are also dependent on the overall request volumes. If you've got 10k pending db_update requests, and only 5 pending compaction requests, then cranking compaction priority is not going to have a massive negative impact on db_update throughput. Similarly, if you've only got one compaction job running, you'll run into diminishing returns for how effectively you can prioritize compaction as there's insufficient request volume to prioritize. You'll need to experiment with increasing Smoosh concurrency to get more jobs running to have more queued items to prioritize.

Setting Priority Values

IOQ2 contains utility functions for setting all configuration related values; you should not need to use config:set for any IOQ2 related configuration changes. In addition to the various config tunables, there are builtin helpers to assist with setting appropriate priorities. All priority values should be floating point values, and the described config helpers will prevent you from using non floating point values. All of the config helpers here expect a Reason value to log changes as per standard auditing rules.

NOTE the shard priorities do not include the shard suffix in the config names to preserve priorities between cycled dbs, so if for whatever reason you manually set shard priorities, make sure you use filename:rootname(ShardName) to drop the suffix so that your config options work as expected.

Setting Class Priority Values

Class specific priority multipliers can be set as demonstrated below. The class name should be an Erlang atom, and the value should be a float. For example:

ioq_config:set_class_config(interactive, 3.2, "Insightful motivation").
ioq_config:set_class_config(db_compact, 0.5, "Moar compactions").

Setting Shard/Class Specific Priority Values

You can prioritize on Shard/Class pairs, there is no shard wide prioritization so you'll need to set each class as appropriate. This function takes a #shard{} record as returned by mem3:shards.

Shard = hd(mem3:shards(DbName)),
ioq_config:set_shard_config(Shard, db_update, 2.3, "Prioritize db updates").

You could call set_shard_config for every shard for a given database, but there's a helper for that as well:

Setting Shard/Class Priority for all Shards in a Database

There's a helper function for setting a class priority on all shards for a given database name. Similarly to the shard/class configs, you have to specify each class priority individually. You can use it as follows:

ioq_config:set_db_config(<<"foo/bar">>, view_update, 0.8, "Build that view").

This is roughly equivalent to:

[set_shard_config(S, Class, Value, Reason) || S <- mem3:shards(DbName)].

Setting User Specific Priority Values

You can set a global multiplier for a particular user to increase or decrease the priority of all of their requests. Here's an example:

ioq_config:set_user_config(<<"foo">>, 3.7, "Priority user").

The set_user_config currently does not validate that the user exists, so you'll want to validate you set the config for the appropriate user.

Verifying Expected Prioritization Matches up with Reality

Ok great, so you've just used the handy helpers to set varius priority values, but how do you verify it did what you expect? How do you test to see that the multipliers result in a prioritization in the desired range? The prioritization logic is self contained and can easily be experimented with. You have two options, either with the check_priority/3 function, or by using the prioritize function directly. The check_priority function is the simple approach, and precludes you from having to build up the relevant priority data structures. It can be used as follows:

User = <<"foo">>,
DbName = <<"foo/bar">>,
Shard = hd(mem3:shards(DbName)),
ioq_config:check_priority(internal_repl, User, Shard).

That will return the floating point prioritization value for that request. You can also experiment with your own config options directly by way of using the ioq_config:prioritize function. To demonstrate an example of using this, here is the source code for the check_priority function used above:

-spec check_priority(atom(), binary(), binary()) -> float().
check_priority(Class, User, Shard0) ->
    {ok, ClassP} = build_class_priorities(),
    {ok, UserP} = build_user_priorities(),
    {ok, ShardP} = build_shard_priorities(),

    Shard = filename:rootname(Shard0),
    Req = #ioq_request{
        user = User,
        shard = Shard,
        class = Class
    },

    prioritize(Req, ClassP, UserP, ShardP).

The build_*_priorities() functions are all exported from the ioq_config module and are directly usable for easy testing. You can also see the full list of priority values from those priority data structures like so:

(node1@127.0.0.1)14> khash:to_list(ShardP).
[{{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>,interactive},1.0e3},
 {{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo/pizza_db">>,db_update},
   1.5}]

Other Configuration Knobs

There are a number of other configuration knobs availabe and they're detailed below.

IOQ2 Concurrency

We'll start out with one of the more awkward configuration tunables: concurrency! This option is awkward because it fundamentally changes the dynamics of IOQ, both IOQ1 and IOQ2. If concurrency is higher than the number of parallel requests, then you'll never actually prioritize things and using IOQ is a waste. If it's too low then you'll overly bottleneck the system and cause a backup of requests.

This awkwardness is further compounded by the fact that IOQ2 is inherently concurrent in that it has one IOQ2 pid per scheduler, so you must exercise caution with setting the concurrency value! This value is propagated to every IOQ2 pid, so setting concurrency is essentially multiplicative, and total concurrency will be concurrency * num_schedulers. Most of our newer systems now have 48 cores, and we have have systems with 56 cores now, so setting IOQ2 concurrency to 5 could result in a total concurrency of 250+!!! The ioq:get_disk_concurrency() function (which calls ioq_server2:get_concurrency() when IOQ2 is enabled) will aggregate these concurrency values together, giving you the full total, so that's useful to double check.

Interestingly enough, the best concurrency value found so far through emperical means is concurrency=1 per IOQ2 pid! This is the current default, and so on machines with 48 cores we end up with a total concurrency of 49. So far the default of one has been fairly effective, but given sufficient volume of requests it might be worthwhile to bump it up. Start small and trying bumping it up to two, or maybe three. For example:

ioq_config:set_concurrency(2, "Bumping concurrency").

NOTE if you do feel the need to update concurrency, please do notify @chewbranca afterwards so we can observe this in more workloads.

IOQ2 Resize Limit

The resize limit value controls how many requests to handle before triggering the auto scaling elevator logic described above. This defaults to 1000, and can be changed with:

ioq_config:set_resize_limit(5000, "Huge resize limit test").

NOTE if you do feel the need to update resize_limit, please do notify @chewbranca afterwards so we can observe this in more workloads.

IOQ2 Scale Factor

The scale factor defines the multiplier to use during auto scaling when the resize limit is hit. This currently defaults to two, which means every ten auto scale iterations you'll have increased the priority one thousand fold for any requests that have been in the queue for all ten cycles. This value may or may not be too aggressive. Setting this to one essentially eliminates the auto scaling elevator logic entirely, which is not really recommended. You can update it as follows:

ioq_config:set_scale_factor(1.7, "Modifying scale factor").

NOTE if you do feel the need to update scale_factor, please do notify @chewbranca afterwards so we can observe this in more workloads.

IOQ2 Max Priority

Max priority establishes an upper bound on the priority values. It currently defaults to 10000.0. There is also an implicit lower bound on priority values of 0.0. Depending on how wild you go with the multipliers, it might be useful to increase this value, which can be done with the following:

ioq_config:set_max_priority(55555.0, "Expand priority space").

IOQ2 Dedupe

Both IOQ1 and IOQ2 have a dedupe feature that will avoid performing the same read multiple times in parallel. In IOQ1 this operation scanned through lists and could become a considerable resource hog. In IOQ2 this is a simple khash lookup and should not be a problem. You should not need to ever disable this. For whatever reason if you need to, you can do so with:

ioq_config:set_dedupe(false, "Disable dedupe test").

NOTE if you do feel the need to update dedupe, please do notify @chewbranca afterwards so we can observe this in more workloads.

IOQ2 Bypass

IOQ2 has the same bypass logic as IOQ1, however, the whole point of IOQ2 is to make a sufficiently performant IOQ that bypasses are not necessary. This functionality was included in IOQ2 as a backup in case max throughput is essential and unreachable with IOQ2. You can set it in the standard manner, but in the ioq2.bypass namespace as follows:

ioq_config:set_bypass(interactive, true, "Bypass interactive channel").

NOTE if you do feel the need to bypass IOQ2, please do notify @chewbranca afterwards so we can observe this in more workloads. Yes, this NOTE blurb is in a number of config descriptions, but please do notify @chewbranca if you feel the need to bypass anything.

IOQ2 Dispatch Strategy

IOQ2 utilizes many processes to achieve the desired throughput and performance. There are several different dispatch strategies for determining how requests are funneled through these IOQ pids, and a single_server fallback in the event only a single IOQ2 server is desired. Changing dispatch strategies is a safe operation to perform, all the pids already exist and it will just toggle which to go through. All active requests will continue to go through the IOQ2 pid they were initially handled by, and any new requests will go through the specified IOQ2. The four current dispatch strategies are:

  • "server_per_scheduler"
  • "fd_hash"
  • "random"
  • "single_server"

Server per Scheduler Dispatch Strategy

ioq_config:set_dispatch_strategy("server_per_scheduler", "Changing dispatch)).

This is the default dispatch strategy. IOQ2 creates N ioq_server2 pids, where N is the number of Erlang VM schedulers on the current system, which defaults to the number of CPU Cores. This dispatch strategy uses the the current scheduler of the caller process to determine which IOQ2 server to use. This has the nice property of automatically distributing work out across IOQ2 servers based on how the Erlang VM is spreading out work across the schedulers. In practice this works pretty well and seems reasonable at a high level, but it may or may not be optimal for all workloads, which is why we have multiple dispatch strategies.

FD Hash Scheduler Dispatch Strategy

ioq_config:set_dispatch_strategy("fd_hash", "Changing dispatch)).

The fd_hash dispatch strategy hashes on the couch_file pid the request has as a destination, and then ensures that all requests to the same couch_file pid go through a single IOQ2 pid. This provides the most control over prioritization of requests to individual shards, as all requests to that shard will go through the single IOQ2 pid, providing global prioritization rather than localized by IOQ2 pid. This can be useful when dealing with overloaded couch_file pids where you want to minimize and focus work send to those pids. Also, by funneling all reuqests to the same shard through the same IOQ2 pid, this increases the opportunity for deduping requests, which can be significant. This dispatch strategy can result in uneven distribution of work across IOQ2 pids, so it's not appropriate for all situations, but for many dedicated clusters this could be an ideal dispatch strategy.

Random Dispatch Strategy

ioq_config:set_dispatch_strategy("random", "Changing dispatch)).

The random dispatch strategy just randomly selects one of the IOQ2 pids to send the request to. This dispatch strategy uses a random normal distribution and should result in roughly even work distributed across all IOQ2 pids. This is not the default strategy because if there's less concurrent requests active in the system than total IOQ2 pids, there will not actually be any prioritization taking place, in which case the server_per_scheduler dispatch strategy should be preferred as it will reduce the number of IOQ2 pids in use as a function of how much work is on the system.

Single Server Dispatch Strategy

ioq_config:set_dispatch_strategy("random", "Changing dispatch)).

This is a fallback dispatch strategy that may or may not be removed at some point. This utilizes a single IOQ2 pid for all requests, eliminating the benefits of parallel IOQ2 pids and inevitably resulting in IOQ2 becoming a bottleneck in the same way as IOQ1, albeit a faster bottleneck.


Finding the pids

The IOQ2 pids per scheduler have registered names of the form ioq_server_$N where $N is the scheduler id, starting from 1. You can get a list of all the IOQ2 pids on the current system with the following:

(node1@127.0.0.1)10> ioq_sup:ioq_server_pids().
[ioq_server_1,ioq_server_2]

ioq_config:ioq_classes

You can see the proper names for all registered IOQ classes with the following:

(node1@127.0.0.1)15> ioq_config:ioq_classes().
[customer,internal_repl,view_compact,db_compact,low,db_meta,
 db_update,view_update,other,interactive]

Dynamic IOQ classes

To support 3rd party IO channels for things like search/geo/cache/etc, you can manually set a config priority for the desired class, and then it will be picked up by ioq_config:is_valid_class/1. Because the ioq_config:set_* setters depend on is_valid_class, you must manually define the priority initially, for example with config:set("ioq.classes", "search", "1.0").. Afterwards, you'll be able to utilize the setters as expected.

ioq_server2:get_state

You can see a human readable representation of the IOQ2 server state with the following block of code. The output is "human readable" in that the khash and hqueue data structures have been transformed into lists so the contents can be viewed. This fetches the state of the ioq_server_1 pid. If you want a different pid you'll need to manually gen_server:call into it.

(node1@127.0.0.1)16> ioq_server2:get_state().
{state,[],[],[],1,0,
       [{view_update,1.0},
        {view_compact,0.0001},
        {db_compact,0.0001},
        {low,0.0001},
        {db_update,1.0},
        {customer,1.0},
        {internal_repl,0.001},
        {interactive,1.0},
        {other,1.0},
        {db_meta,1.0}],
       [],
       [{{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>,interactive},1.0e3},
        {{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo/pizza_db">>,db_update},
         1.5}],
       2.0,true,1000,1,ioq_server_1,0,normal,1.0e4}

If you want to have the pretty printed version and be able to fetch the fields directly, you'll need to include the ioq_server2 records, for example:

(node1@127.0.0.1)17> rr(ioq_server2), ioq_server2:get_state().
#state{reqs = [],waiters = [],queue = [],concurrency = 1,
       iterations = 0,
       class_p = [{view_update,1.0},
                  {view_compact,0.0001},
                  {db_compact,0.0001},
                  {low,0.0001},
                  {db_update,1.0},
                  {customer,1.0},
                  {internal_repl,0.001},
                  {interactive,1.0},
                  {other,1.0},
                  {db_meta,1.0}],
       user_p = [],
       shard_p = [{{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>,interactive},
                   1.0e3},
                  {{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo/pizza_db">>,db_update},
                   1.5}],
       scale_factor = 2.0,dedupe = true,resize_limit = 1000,
       next_key = 1,server_name = ioq_server_1,scheduler_id = 1,
       collect_stats = normal,max_priority = 1.0e4}

To fetch the server state from a particular IOQ2 pid, you can do so with the following:

(node1@127.0.0.1)18> gen_server:call(ioq_server_2, get_state).
#state{reqs = [],waiters = [],queue = [],concurrency = 1,
       iterations = 0,
       class_p = [{view_update,1.0},
                  {view_compact,0.0001},
                  {db_compact,0.0001},
                  {low,0.0001},
                  {db_update,1.0},
                  {customer,1.0},
                  {internal_repl,0.001},
                  {interactive,1.0},
                  {other,1.0},
                  {db_meta,1.0}],
       user_p = [],
       shard_p = [{{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>,interactive},
                   1.0e3},
                  {{<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo/pizza_db">>,db_update},
                   1.5}],
       scale_factor = 2.0,dedupe = true,resize_limit = 1000,
       next_key = 1,server_name = ioq_server_2,scheduler_id = 2,
       collect_stats = normal,max_priority = 1.0e4}

Gotchas

Some miscellaneous "gotchas" to be aware of.

Shard Class Configs Drop Suffixes

By default the shard names include the db file suffix which is the timestamp of creation time. These suffixes must be dropped from the config entries, otherwise they will not be picked up in the IOQ2 config. For instance, here's what the default name looks like, followed by properly truncating the suffix:

(node1@127.0.0.1)21> S#shard.name.
<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo.1503945430">>
(node1@127.0.0.1)22> filename:rootname(S#shard.name).
<<"shards/00000000-1fffffff/foo">>

Shard Configs Persist Through Db Cycles, but not Reshards

In the Shard Class Configs Drop Suffixes "gotcha" above, you'll see that suffixes are not an allowed part of the shard config keys. The motivation here is to allow for database configs persisting through cycles, eg deleting and recreating a database will preserve the config.

HOWEVER, if you delete the database and recreate it with a new sharding factor, you'll end up with a completely different set of shards and the old configs will no longer map over and it will essentially reset to the defaults. This should be obvious given that the shard configs are keyed on the full shard name, so switching said shard name will result in a different config key. You'll need to manually reset the configs with the appropriate new shards once the database has been recreated or resharded.

Non integer/float Priority Configs are Ignored

If you set a config value that is not an integer or floating point value, that configuration will be silently ignored and replaced with the default value of 1.0. Check out the docs above about how to verify config expectations. The ioq_config helpers described above will only allow you to set configs with floating point values, so if you only use those this should never be a problem. However if you manually set the config values you might run into this. The IOQ2 config will attempt to convert integers to floats, but any other values will be ignored.

Only a subset of metrics reducers are enabled

The https://metrics.cloudant.com tabs are predominantly powerd by Centinela reducers that aggregate the node specific metrics into an individual global metric. Due to the current precarious state of the metrics stack, the IOQ2 work has been cautious with the introduction of new metrics. Only the reduced metrics currently enabled on the IOQ2 tab have reducers enabled. If you need additional reducers you'll need to add them. For example, the iowait metrics are reduced on median but not P99.9:

(chewbranca)-(jobs:0)-(~)
(! 14529)-> acurl
https://cloudant.cloudant.com/metrics/couchdb.io_queue2.iowait.percentile.50
{"_id":"couchdb.io_queue2.iowait.percentile.50","_rev":"1-e0ad9472a61b9a46ace4c9852ce63a36","reduce":true,"reducers":["mean"]}

(chewbranca)-(jobs:0)-(~)
(! 14530)-> acurl
https://cloudant.cloudant.com/metrics/couchdb.io_queue2.iowait.percentile.999
{"error":"not_found","reason":"missing"}

IOQ2 Concurrency is Multiplicative

This is covered in depth in the concurrency sections above, but this is an important enough point to warrant calling it out here as well. With IOQ1 concurrency is singular for the one IOQ1 pid, but in IOQ2 concurrency is set for every IOQ2 pid. This means you should realistically never set concurrency above single digits for IOQ2. Setting concurrency to five on a system with 56 CPU cores will result in a total concurrency of over 250, which is probably not productive.

IOQ2 Can Only Prioritize Work when there's a Backlog of Work

As mentioned above, IOQ is inherently a bottleneck, otherwise it isn't actually able to prioritize any work. On a similar note, if there's an insufficient volume of a particular request type, you won't be able to significantly influence the throughput of that type. For instance, you can bump compaction priority to the moon but if there's only one compaction job you're not going to make a significant difference to the volume of compaction requests.

The other side of this is that IOQ2 is only effective at prioritizing work when there's a variety of work types. If you've got a problematic MT user that you want to back burner, you can set the user priority to 0.0 and all their requests will be prioritized at 0.0 and will never benefit from the auto scaling elevator. That said, if there are no other users making requests to the system, then that user's requests will still be chugging along as fast as they come in. IOQ2 is NOT a rate limiting system, it's a prioritization system that prioritizes requests relative to all other pending requests. Without sufficient work it's essentially just a pass through.


Request for feedback

IOQ and IOQ2 are complicated beasts, and there's a lot of tunable knobs here. It is expected that we'll need to experiment with different levels for different workloads, so please do be diligent about informing @chewbranca of situations where you've had to change the configuration options above that request notifications. Any other thoughts/comments/suggestions welcome as well. Similarly, feedback is welcome on the IOQ2 metrics tab as well.