Category Archives: Operation costs

Twitch Stream about ZFS, zpool scrubbing, Hard drives, Data Centers, NVMe, Rack Servers…

Twitch stream on 2022-06-06 10:50 IST

In this very long session we went through actual errors in a ZFS pool, we check the Kernel, we remove and reinsert the drive, conduct zpool scrub… in the meantime I talked about Rack, Rack Servers, PSU, redundant components, ECC RAM…

The Ethernet standards group announces a new 800 GbE specification

Here is the link to the new: https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/the-ethernet-standards-group-developed-a-new-speed-so-fast-it-had-to-change-its-name/

This is a great new for scaling performance in the Data Centers. For routers, switches…

And this makes me think about all the Architects that are using Memcached and Redis in different Servers, in Networks of 1Gbps and makes me want to share with you what a nonsense, is often, that.

So the idea of having Memcache or Redis is just to cache the queries and unload the Database from those queries.

But 1Gbps is equivalent to 125MB (Megabytes) per second.

Local RAM Memory in Servers can perform at 24GB and more (24,000,000 Megabytes) per second, even more.

A PCIE NVMe drive at 3.5GB per second.

A local SSD drive without RAID 550 MB/s.

A SSD in the Cloud, varies a lot on the provider, number of drives, etc… but I’ve seen between 200 MB/s and 2.5GB/s aggregated in RAID.

In fact I have worked with Servers equipped with several IO Controllers, that were delivering 24GB/s of throughput writing or reading to HDD spinning drives.

If you’re in the Cloud. Instead of having 2 Load Balancers, 100 Front Web servers, with a cluster of 5 Redis with huge amount of RAM, and 1 MySQL Master and 1 Slave, all communicating at 1Gbps, probably you’ll get a better performance having the 2 LBs, and 11 Front Web with some more memory and having the Redis instance in the same machine and saving the money of that many small Front and from the 5 huge dedicated Redis.

The same applies if you’re using Docker or K8s.

Even if you just cache the queries to drive, speed will be better than sending everything through 1 Gbps.

This will matter for you if your site is really under heavy load. Most of the sites just query the MySQL Server using 1 Gbps lines, or 2 Gbps in bonding, and that’s enough.

Resources for Microservices and Business Domain Solutions for the Cloud Architect / Microservices Architect

First you have to understand that Python, Java and PHP are worlds completely different.

In Python you’ll probably use Flask, and listen to the port you want, inside Docker Container.

In PHP you’ll use a Frameworks like Laravel, or Symfony, or Catalonia Framework (my Framework) :) and a repo or many (as the idea is that the change in one microservice cannot break another it is recommended to have one git repo per Service) and split the requests with the API Gateway and Filters (so /billing/ goes to the right path in the right Server, is like rewriting URLs). You’ll rely in Software to split your microservices. Usually you’ll use Docker, but you have to add a Web Server and any other tools, as the source code is not packet with a Web Server and other Dependencies like it is in Java Spring Boot.

In Java you’ll use Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, and every Service will be auto-contained in its own JAR file, that includes Apache Tomcat and all other Dependencies and normally running inside a Docker. Tcp/Ip listening port will be set at start via command line, or through environment. You’ll have many git repositories, one per each Service.

Using many repos, one per Service, also allows to deploy only that repository and to have better security, with independent deployment tokens.

It is not unlikely that you’ll use one language for some of your Services and another for other, as well as a Database or another, as each Service is owner of their data.

In any case, you will be using CI/CD and your pipeline will be something like this:

  1. Pull the latest code for the Service from the git repository
  2. Compile the code (if needed)
  3. Run the Unit and Integration Tests
  4. Compile the service to an executable artifact (f.e. Java JAR with Tomcat server and other dependencies)
  5. Generate a Machine image with your JAR deployed (for Java. Look at Spotify Docker Plugin to Docker build from Maven), or with Apache, PHP, other dependencies, and the code. Normally will be a Docker image. This image will be immutable. You will probably use Dockerhub.
  6. Machine image will be started. Platform test are run.
  7. If platform tests pass, the service is promoted to the next environment (for example Dev -> Test -> PreProd -> Prod), the exact same machine is started in the next environment and platform tests are repeated.
  8. Before deploying to Production the new Service, I recommend running special Application Tests / Behavior-driven. By this I mean, to conduct tests that really test the functionality of everything, using a real browser and emulating the acts of a user (for example with BeHat, Cucumber or with JMeter).
    I recommend this specially because Microservices are end-points, independent of the implementation, but normally they are API that serve to a whole application. In an Application there are several components, often a change in the Front End can break the application. Imagine a change in Javascript Front End, that results in a call a bit different, for example, with an space before a name. Imagine that the Unit Tests for the Service do not test that, and that was not causing a problem in the old version of the Service and so it will crash when the new Service is deployed. Or another example, imagine that our Service for paying with Visa cards generates IDs for the Payment Gateway, and as a result of the new implementation the IDs generated are returned. With the mocked objects everything works, but when we deploy for real is when we are going to use the actual Bank Payment. This is also why is a good idea to have a PreProduction environment, with PreProduction versions of the actual Services we use (all banks or the GDS for flights/hotel reservation like Galileo or Amadeus have a Test, exactly like Production, Gateway)

If you work with Microsoft .NET, you’ll probably use Azure DevOps.

We IT Engineers, CTOs and Architects, serve the Business. We have to develop the most flexible approaches and enabling the business to release as fast as their need.

Take in count that Microservices is a tool, a pattern. We will use it to bring more flexibility and speed developing, resilience of the services, and speed and independence deploying. However this comes at a cost of complexity.

Microservices is more related to giving flexibility to the Business, and developing according to the Business Domains. Normally oriented to suite an API. If you have an API that is consumed by third party you will have things like independence of Services (if one is down the others will still function), gradual degradation, being able to scale the Services that have more load only, being able to deploy a new version of a Service which is independent of the rest of the Services, etc… the complexity in the technical solution comes from all this resilience, and flexibility.

If your Dev Team is up to 10 Developers or you are writing just a CRUD Web Application, a PoC, or you are an Startup with a critical Time to Market you probably you will not want to use Microservices approach. Is like killing flies with laser cannons. You can use typical Web services approach, do everything in one single Https request, have transactions, a single Database, etc…

But if your team is 100 Developer, like a big eCommerce, you’ll have multiple Teams between 5 and 10 Developers per Business Domain, and you need independence of each Service, having less interdependence. Each Service will own their own Data. That is normally around 5 to 7 tables. Each Service will serve a Business Domain. You’ll benefit from having different technologies for the different needs, however be careful to avoid having Teams with different knowledge that can have hardly rotation and difficult to continue projects when the only 2 or 3 Devs that know that technology leave. Typical benefit scenarios can be having MySql for the Billing Services, but having NoSQL Database for the image catalog, or to store logs of account activity. With Microservices, some services will be calling other Services, often asynchronously, using Queues or Streams, you’ll have Callbacks, Databases for reading, you’ll probably want to have gradual and gracefully failure of your applications, client load balancing, caches and read only databases/in-memory databases… This complexity is in order to protect one Service from the failure of others and to bring it the necessary speed under heavy load.

Here you can find a PDF Document of the typical resources I use for Microservice Projects.

You can also download it from my github repository:

https://github.com/carlesmateo/awesome-microservices

Do you use other solutions that are not listed?. Leave a message. I’ll investigate them and update the Document, to share with the Community.

Update 2020-03-06: I found this very nice article explaining the same. Microservices are not for everybody and not the default option: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/04/microservices_last_resort/

Update 2020-03-11: Qcom with 1,600 microservices says that microservices architecture is the las resort: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/09/monzo_microservices/

A quick note about symmetric encryption and entropy

I had the discussion with some friends about symmetric encryption, and about the problem of security that it supposes that the encryption resulting of a block of data, for the same password, will be always the same. I write it here the explanations I tell them and what I do, so I can just send this link instead of explaining the same every time. :)

I am using different kinds of encryption for my new 2014’s Messenger C-Client.

The main advantage of symmetric encryption for me, is that is cheap in terms of CPU usage.

When I send files thought my messenger all the data blocks have to be encrypted, and so, if I send the Ubuntu 14.10 ISO image, this is a lot of data to encrypt, and in order to get a good throughput and performance I needed to find an outstanding optimal way to do it, that is at the same time secure.

Many encryption techniques and algorithms can be used, and all at the same time over the same packets to make them more secure. In this article I will describe only an improvement to the symmetric encryption to make it no predictable and very fast, so cheap to use.

So I introduce the concept here of noise, or entropy, in symmetric data packets.

Imagine that you want to send a chunk of data that is:

SGVsbG8sIEkgc2VlIHRoYXQgeW91IHRyeSB0aGluZ3MuIDopIENvbmdyYXRz

For clarity, only base64 are used in this sample, no binary data.

The problem is that every time that you send this chunk of data, you’ll get the same encrypted string. This is predictable and can lead to someone to reverse engineer your password.

So taking in consideration this sample Java 1.7 source code (note that variables use MT notation) that just encrypts for a given key:

import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.security.SecureRandom;
import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;
import java.util.UUID;
import javax.crypto.Cipher;
import javax.crypto.IllegalBlockSizeException;
import javax.crypto.KeyGenerator;
import javax.crypto.NoSuchPaddingException;
import javax.crypto.SecretKey;

/**
 * @author Carles Mateo
 */
public abstract class Security {

    public static String encrypt(String s_key, String s_str) {
        try {
            
            /** encryption cypher */
            Cipher o_ecipher; 
          
            SecureRandom seed = SecureRandom.getInstance("SHA1PRNG");

            seed.setSeed(s_key.getBytes());

            KeyGenerator keygen = KeyGenerator.getInstance("DES");

            keygen.init(seed);

            SecretKey key = keygen.generateKey();

            o_ecipher = Cipher.getInstance("DES");
            o_ecipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);
            
            // Encode the string into bytes using utf-8
            byte[] utf8 = s_str.getBytes("UTF8");

            // Encrypt
            byte[] enc = o_ecipher.doFinal(utf8);
            
            // Encode bytes to base64 to get a string
            String s_encrypted_encoded = encodeBase64(enc);
            
            return s_encrypted_encoded;
        } catch (javax.crypto.BadPaddingException e) {
        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) { 
        } catch (NoSuchPaddingException e) { 
        } catch (IllegalBlockSizeException e) {
        } catch (java.io.IOException e) {
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }

        return null;
    }
}

Then here is the cheap way that consist in making the original data always be different, that I came with.

Instead of sending just the data, add a bit of entropy or noise, like an UUID, so our packet would be:

f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479|SGVsbG8sIEkgc2VlIHRoYXQgeW91IHRyeSB0aGluZ3MuIDopIENvbmdyYXRz

If you’re reading this article you already know, but just in case, the f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479 is an UUID.

The pipe | is for clarity, as the UUID has a length fix it is not really needed to manipulate the string.

Having this UUID in here is also cool, as it will allow us to do things like using this UUID as the password for the next packet. So if our messenger starts with the user’s password, from there the next packets could use this UUID as password (and the next one, the previously random generated UUID and so on…) so every packet has a new password, that must be known from the previous history in order to get all the packets description.

So if a man-in-the-middle is capturing all the data sent, hoping to being able to break the encryption in a near future, it will have to be sure to record all the packets to decode the sequence easily, otherwise will have to fight to break every single packet.

So UUID is random, but is not noise at all. It is useful entropy.

Another thing that we can do to is set a timestamp on the packet, that way, even if a man in the middle is able to clone and later send the initial packet to the Server, it will be discarded.

For example:

f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479|1428002755|SGVsbG8sIEkgc2VlIHRoYXQgeW91IHRyeSB0aGluZ3MuIDopIENvbmdyYXRz

The second field is the unix timestamp, so our Server that has tracked the time or the Client’s computer and knows its rid, knows that if he gets a timestamp in the packet that has more than 2 seconds of difference, it will discard the packet and end the connection. So no one in-the-middle will be able to success cloning a login packet, and injecting it to the Server.

So having a basic encapsulation, that is cheap, for transport, the data inside can be also in addition be encrypted with asymmetric and other mechanisms that guarantee that only Client1 and Client2 can decrypt it, and not the Server, while the Server ensures packets are compliant and no noise/attacks are sent though the Server to Clients.

Improving performance in PHP

Article created:

This year I was invited to speak at the PHP Conference at Berlin 2014.

It was really nice, but I had to decline as I was working hard in a Start up, and I hadn’t the required time in order to prepare the nice conference I wanted and that people deserves.

However, having time, I decided to write an article about what I would had speak at the conference.

I will cover improving performance in a single server, and Scaling out multi-Server architecture, focusing on the needs of growing and Start up projects. Many of those techniques can be used to improve performance with other languages, not just with PHP.

Many of my friends are very good Developing, but know nothing about Architecture and Scaling. Hope this approach the two worlds, Development ad Operatings, into a DevOps bridge.

Improving performance on a single server

Hosting

Choose a good hosting. And if you can afford it choose a dedicated server.

Shared hostings are really bad. Some of them kill your http and mysql instances if you reach certain CPU use (really few), while others share the same hardware between 100+ users serving your pages sloooooow. Others cap the amount of queries that your MySql will handle per hour at so ridiculous few amount that even Drupal or WordPress are unable to complete a request in development.

Other ISP (Internet Service Providers) have poor Internet bandwidth, and so you web will load slow to users.

Some companies invest hundreds of thousands in developing a web, and then spend 20 € a year in the hosting. Less than the cost of a dinner.

You can use a decent dedicated server from 50 to 99 €/month and you will celebrate this decision every day.

Take in count that virtualization wastes between 20% and 30% of the CPU power. And if there are several virtual machines the loss will be more because you loss the benefits of the CPU caching for optimizing parallel instructions execution and prediction. Also if the hypervisor host allows to allocate more RAM than physically available and at some point it swaps, the performance of all the VM’s will be much worst.

If you have a VM and it swaps, in most providers the swap goes over the network so there is an additional bottleneck and performance penalty.

To compare the performance of dedicated servers and instances from different Cloud Providers you can take a look at my project cmips.net

Improve your Server

If your Sever has few RAM, add more. And if your project is running slow and you can afford a better Server, do it.

Using SSD disk will incredibly improve the performance on I/O operations and on swap operations. (but please, do backups and keep them in another place)

If you use a CMS like ezpublish with http_cache enabled probably you will prefer to have a Server with faster cores, rather tan a Server with one or more CPU’s plenty of cores, but slower cores, and that last for a longer time to render the page to the http cache.

That may seem obvious but often companies invest 320 hours in optimizing the code 2%, at a cost of let’s say 50 €/h * 320 hours = 16.000 €, while hiring a better Server would had bring between a 20% to 1000% improvement at a cost of additional 50€/month only or at the cost of 100 € of increasing the RAM memory.

The point here is that the hardware is cheap, while the time of the Engineers is expensive. And good Engineers are really hard to find.

And you probably, as a CEO or PO, prefer to use the talent to warranty a nice time to market for your project, or adding more features, rather than wasting this time in refactorizing.

Even with the most optimal code in the universe, if your project is successful at certain point you’ll have to scale. So adding more Servers. To save a Server now at the cost of slowing the business has not any sense.

Upgrade you PHP version

Many projects still use PHP 5.3, and 5.4.

Latest versions of PHP bring more and more performance. If you use old versions of PHP you can have a Quick Win by just upgrading to the last PHP version.

Use OpCache (or other cache accelerator)

OpCache is shipped with PHP 5.5 by default now, so it is the recommended option. It is though to substitute APC.

To activate OpCache edit php.ini and add:

Linux/Unix:

zend_extension=/path/to/opcache.so

Windows:

zend_extension=C:\path\to\php_opcache.dll

opcache-screenshotsIt will greatly improve your PHP performance.

Ensure that OpCache in Production has the optimal config for Production, that will be different from Development Environment.

Note: If you plan to use it with XDebug in Development environments, load OpCache before XDebug.

Disable Profiling and xdebug in Production

In Production disable the profiling, xdebug, and if you use a Framework ensure the Development/Debug features are disabled in Production.

Ensure your logs are not full of warnings

Check that Production logs are not full of warnings.

I’ve seen systems were every seconds 200 warnings were written to logs, the same all the time, and that obviously was slowing down the system.

Typical warnings like this can be easily fixed:

Message: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘UTC’ for ‘8.0/no DST’ instead

Profile in Development

To detect where your slow code is, profile it in Development to see where it is spent the most CPU/time.

Check the slow-queries if you use MySql.

Cache html to disk

Imagine you have a sort of craigslist and you are displaying all the categories, and the number of new messages in this landing page. To do that you are performing many queries to the database, SELECT COUNTs, etc… every time a user visits your page. That certainly will overload your database with actually few concurrent visitors.

Instead of querying the Database all the time, do cache the generated page for a while.

This can be achieved by checking if the cache html file exists, and checking the TTL, and generating a new page if needed.

A simple sample would be:

<?php
    // Cache pages for 5 minutes
    $i_cache_TTL = 300;

    $b_generate_cache = false;

    
    $s_cache_file = '/tmp/index.cache.html';


    if (file_exists($s_cache_file)) {
        // Get creation date
        $i_file_timestamp = filemtime($s_cache_file);
        $i_time_now = microtime(true);
        if ($i_time_now > ($i_file_timestamp + $i_cache_TTL)) {
            $b_generate_cache = true;
        } else {
            // Up to date, get from the disk
            $o_fh = fopen($s_cache_file, "rb");
            $s_html = stream_get_contents($o_fh);
            fclose($o_fh);
            
            // If the file was empty something went wrong (disk full?), so don't use it
            if (strlen($s_html) == 0) {
                $b_generate_cache = true;
            } else {
                // Print the page and exit
                echo $s_html;
                exit();
            }
        }
    } else {
        $b_generate_cache = true;
    }

    ob_start();

    // Render your page normally here
    // ....

    $s_html = ob_get_clean();

    if ($b_generate_cache == true) {
        // Create the file with fresh contents
        $o_fp = fopen($s_cache_file, 'w');
        if (fwrite($o_fp, $s_html) === false) {
            // Error. Impossible to write to disk
            // throw new Exception('CacheCantWrite');
        }
        fclose($o_fp);
    }

    // Send the page to the browser
    echo $s_html;

This sample is simple, and works for many cases, but presents problems.

Imagine for example that the page takes 5 seconds to be generated with a single request, and you have high traffic in that page, let’s say 500 requests per second.

What will happen when the cache expires is that the first user will trigger the cache generation, and the second, and the third…. so all of the 500 requests * 5 seconds will be hitting the database to generate the cache, but… if creating the page per one requests takes 5 seconds, doing this 2,500 times will not last 5 seconds… so your process will enter in a vicious state where the first queries have not ended after minutes, and more and more queries are being added to the queue until:

a) Apache runs out of childs/processes, per configuration

b) Mysql runs out of connections, per configuration

c) Linux runs out of memory, and processes crashes/are killed

Not to mention the users or the API client, waiting infinitely for the http request to complete, and other processes reading a partial file (size bigger than 0 but incomplete).

Different strategies can be used to prevent that, like:

a) using semaphores to lock access to the cache generation (only one process at time)

b) using a .lock file to indicate that the file is being generated, and so next requests serving from the cache until the cache generation process ends the task, also writing to a buffer like acachefile.buffer (to prevent incomplete content being read) and finally when is complete renaming to the final name and removing the .lock

c) using memcached, or similar, to keep an index in memory of what pages are being generated now, and why not, keeping the cached files there instead of a filesystem

d) using crons to generate the cache files, so they run hourly and you ensure only one process generates the cache files

If you use crons, a cheap way to generate the .html content is that the crons curls/wget your webpage. I don’t recommend this as has some problems, like if that web request fails for any reason, you’ll have cached an error instead of content.

I prefer preparing my projects to being able of rendering the content being invoked from HTTP/S or from command line. But if you use curl because is cheap and easy and time to market is important for your project, then be sure that you check that your backend code writes an Status OK in the HTML that the cron can check to ensure that the content has been properly generated. (some crons only check for http status, like 200, but if your database or a xml gateway you use fails you will likely get a 200 and won’t detect that you’re caching pages with “error I can’t connect to the database” instead)

Many Frameworks have their own cache implementation that prevent corruption that could come by several processes writing to the same file at the same time, or from PHP dying in the middle of the render.

You can see a more complex MVC implementation, with Views, from my Framework Catalonia here:

blog-carlesmateo-com-capture-code-cataloniaframeworkBy serving .html files instead of executing PHP with logic and performing queries to the database you will be able to serve hundreds of thousands requests per day with a single machine and really fast -that’s important for SEO also-.

I’ve done this in several Start ups with wonderful results, and my Framework Catalonia also incorporates this functionality very easily to use.

Note: This is only one of the techniques to save the load of the Database Servers. Many more come later.

Cache languages to disk

If you have an application that is multi-language, or if your point for the Strings (sections, pages, campaigns..) to be edited by Marketing is the Database, there is no need to query it all the time.

Simply provide a tool to “generate language files”.

Your languages files can be Javascript files loaded by the page, or can be PHP files generated.

For example, the file common_footer_en.php could be generated reading from Database and be like that:

<php
/* Autogenerated English translations file common_footer_en.php
   on 2014-08-10 02:22 from the database */
$st_translations['seconds']                = 'seconds';
$st_translations['Time']                   = 'Time';
$st_translations['Vars used']              = 'Vars used in these templates';
$st_translations['Total Var replacements'] = 'Total replaced';
$st_translations['Exec time']              = 'Execution time';
$st_translations['Cached controller']      = 'Cached controller';

So the PHP file is going to be generated when someone at your organization updates the languages, and your code is including it normally like with any other PHP file.

Use the Crons

You can set cron jobs to do many operations, like map reduce, counting in the database or effectively deleting the data that the user selected to delete.

Imagine that you have classified portal, and you want to display the number of announces for that category. You can have a table NUM_ANNOUNCES to store the number of announces, and update it hourly. Then your database will only do the counting once per hour, and your application will be reading the number from the table NUM_ANNOUNCES.

The Cron can also be used to make expire old announces. That way you can avoid a user having to wait for that clean up taking process when you have a http request to PHP.

A cron file can be invoked by:

php -f cron.php

By:

./cron.php

If you give permissions of execution with chmod +x and set the first line in cron.php as:

#!/usr/bin/env php

Or you can do a trick, that is emulate a http request from bash, by invoking a url with curl or with wget. Set the .htaccess so the folder for the cron tasks can only be executed from localhost for adding security.

This last trick has the inconvenient that the calling has the same problems as any http requests: restarting Apache will kill the process, the connection can be closed by timed out (e.g. if process is taking more seconds than the max. execution time, etc…)

Use Ramdisk for PHP files

With Linux is very easy to setup a RamDisk.

You can setup a RamDisk and rsync all your web .PHP files at system boot time, and when deploying changes, and config Apache to use the Ramdisk folder for the website.

That way for every request to the web, PHP files will be served from RAM directly, saving the slow disk access. Even with OpCache active, is a great improvement.

At these times were one Gigabyte of memory is really cheap there is a huge difference from reading files from disk, and getting them from memory. (Reading and writing to RAM memory is many many many times faster than magnetic disks, and many times faster than SSD disks)

Also .js, .css, images… can be served from a Ram disk folder, depending on how big your web is.

Ramdisk for /tmp

If your project does operations on disk, like resizing images, compressing files, reading/writing large CSV files, etcetera you can greatly improve the performance by setting the /tmp folder to a Ramdisk.

If your PHP project receives file uploads they will also benefit (a bit) from storing the temporal files to RAM instead to the disk.

Use Cache Lite

Cache Lite is a Pear extension that allows you to keep data in a local cache of the Web Server.

You can cache .html pages, or you can cache Queries and their result.

Example from http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.caching.cache-lite.cache-lite.save.php:

<?php
require_once "Cache/Lite.php";

$options = array(
    'cacheDir' => '/tmp/',
    'lifeTime' => 7200,
    'pearErrorMode' => CACHE_LITE_ERROR_DIE
);
$cache = new Cache_Lite($options);

if ($data = $cache->get('id_of_the_page')) {

    // Cache hit !
    // Content is in $data
    echo $data;

} else { 
    
    // No valid cache found (you have to make and save the page)
    $data = '<html><head><title>test</title></head><body><p>this is a test</p></body></html>';
    echo $data;
    $cache->save($data);
    
}

It is nice that Cache Lite handles the TTL and keeps the info stored in different sub-directories in order to keep a decent performance. (As you may know many files in the same directory slows the access much).

Use HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) from Facebook

Facebook Engineers are always trying to optimize what is run on the Servers.

Faster code means, less machines. Even 1% of CPU use improvement means a lot of Servers less. Less Servers to maintain, less money wasted, less space on the Data Centers…

So they created the HHVM HipHop Virtual Machine that is able to run PHP code, much much faster than PHP. And is compatible with most of the Frameworks and Open Source projects.

They also created the Hack language that is an improved PHP, with type hinting.

So you can use HHVM to make your code run faster with the same Server and without investing a single penny.

Use C extensions

You can create and use your own C extensions.

C extensions will bring really fast execution. Just to get the idea:
I built a PHP extension to compare the performance from calculating the Bernoulli number with PHP and with the .so extension created in C.
In my Core i7 times were:
PHP:
Computed in 13.872583150864 s
PHP calling the C compiled extension:
Computed in 0.038495063781738 s

That’s 360.37 times faster using the C extension. Not bad.

Use Zephir

Zephir is a an Open Source language, very similar to PHP,  that allows to create and maintain easily extensions for PHP.

Use Phalcon

Phalcon is a Web MVC Framework implemented as C extension, so it offers a high performance.

phalcon-chart

The views syntax are very very similar to Twig.

Tutorial – Creating a Poll application in 15 minutes with Phalcon from Phalcon Framework on Vimeo.

Check if you’re using the correct Engine for MySql

Many Developers create the tables and never worry about that. And many are using MyIsam by default. It was the by default Engine prior to MySql 5.5.

While MyIsam can bring good performance in some certain cases, my recommendation is to use InnoDb.

Normally you’ll have a gain in performance with MyIsam if you’ve a table were you only write or only read, but in all the other cases InnoDb is expected to be much more performant and safe.

MyIsam tables also get corruption from time to time and need manually fixing and writing to disks are not so reliable than InnoDb.

As MyIsam uses table-locking for updates and deletes to any existing row, it is easy to see that if you’re in a web environment with multiple users, blocking the table -so the other operations have to wait- will make things be slow.

If you have to use Joins clearly you will benefit from using InnoDb also.

Use InMemory Engine from MySql

MySql has a very powerful Engine called InMemory.

The InMemory Engine will store things in RAM and loss the data when MySql is restarted.

However is very fast and very easy to use.

Imagine that you have a travel application that constantly looks at which country belongs the city specified by user. A Quickwin would be to INSERT all this data in the InMemory Engine of MySql when it is started, and do just one change in your code: to use that Table.

Really easy. Quick improvement.

Use curl asynchronously

If your PHP has to communicate with other systems using curl, you can do the http/s call, and instead of waiting for a response let your PHP do more things in the meantime, and then check the results.

You can also call to multiple curl calls in parallel, and so avoid doing one by one in serial.

Here you have a sample.

Serialize

Guess that you have a query that returns 1000 results. Then you add one by one to an array.

Probably you’re going to have substantial gain if you keep in the database a single row, with the array serialized.

So an array like:

$st_places = Array(‘Barcelona’, ‘Dublin’, ‘Edinburgh’, ‘San Francisco’, ‘London’, ‘Berlin’, ‘Andorra la Vella’, ‘Prats de Lluçanès’);

Would be serialized to an string like:

a:8:{i:0;s:9:”Barcelona”;i:1;s:6:”Dublin”;i:2;s:9:”Edinburgh”;i:3;s:13:”San Francisco”;i:4;s:6:”London”;i:5;s:6:”Berlin”;i:6;s:16:”Andorra la Vella”;i:7;s:19:”Prats de Lluçanès”;}

This can be easily stored as String and unserialized later back to an array.

blog-carlesmateo-com-array_serializeNote: In Internet we have a lot of encodings, Hebrew, Japanese… languages. Be careful with encodings when serializing, using JSon, XML, storing in databases without UTF support, etc…

Use Memcached to store common things

Memcached is a NoSql database in memory that can run in cluster.

The idea is to keep things there, in order to offload the load of the database. And as everything is in RAM it really runs fast.

You can use Memcached to cache Queries and their results also.

For example:

You have query SELECT * FROM translations WHERE section=’MAIN’.

Then you look if that String exists as key in the Memcached, and if it exists you fetch the results (that are serialized) and you avoid the query. If it doesn’t exist, you do normally the query to the database, serialize the array and store it in the Memcached with a TTL (Time to Live) using the Query (String) as primary key. For security you may prefer to hash the query with MD5 or SHA-1 and use the hash as key instead of using it plain.

When the TTL is reached the validity of the data would have expired and so it’s time to reinsert the contents in the next query.

Be careful, I’ve seen projects that were caching private data from users without isolating the key properly, so other users were getting the info from other users.

For example, if the key used was ‘Name’ and the value ‘Carles Mateo’ obviously the next user that fetch the key ‘Name’ would get my name and not theirs.

If you store private data of users in Memcache, it is a nice idea to append the owner of that info to the hash. E.g. using key: 10701577-FFADCEDBCCDFFFA10C

Where ‘10701577’ would be the user_id of the owner of the info, and ‘FFADCEDBCCDFFFA10C’ a hash of the query.

Before I suggested that you can keep a table of counting for the announces in a classified portal. This number can be stored in the Memcached instead.

You can store also common things, like translations, or cities like in the example before, rate of change for a currency exchanging website…

The most common way to store things there is serialized or Json encoded.

Be aware of the memory limits of Memcached and contrl the cache hitting ratio to avoid inserting data, and losing it constantly because is used few and Memcached has few memory.

You can also use Redis.

Use jQuery for Production (small file) and minimized files for js

Use the Production jQuery library in Production, I mean do not use the bigger file Development jQuery library for Production.

There are product that eliminate all the necessary spaces in .js and .css files, and so are served much faster. These process is called minify.

It is important to know that in many emerging markets in the world, like Brazil, they have slow DSL lines. Many 512 Kbit/secons, and even modem connections!.

Activate compression in the Server

If you send large text files, or Jsons, you’ll benefit from activating the compression at the Server.

It consumes some CPU, but many times it brings an important improvement in speed serving the pages to the users.

Use a CDN

You can use a Content Delivery Network to offload your Servers from sending plain texts, html, images, videos, js, css…

You can delegate this to the CDN, they have very speedy Internet lines and Servers, so your Servers can concentrate into doing only BackEnd operations.

The most well known are Akamai and Amazon Cloud Front.

Please take attention to the documentation, a common mistake is to send Cache Headers to the CDN servers, while they’ll use this headers to set the cache TTL and ignore their web configuration parameters. (For example s-maxage, like: Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=600)

This sample header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:50:21 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Cache-Control: max-age=0, public, s-maxage=10800
Vary: X-User-Hash,Accept-Encoding
X-Location-Id: 2
X-Content-Digest: ezlocation/2/end5139244ced4b25606ef0a39235982b1662d01cc
Content-Length: 68250
Age: 3

You can take a look at any website by telneting to the port 80 and doing the request manually or easily by using lynx:

lynx -mime_header http://blog.carlesmateo.com | less

Do you need a Framework?

If you’re processing only BackEnd petitions, like in the video games industry, serving API’s, RESTful, etc… you probably don’t need a Framework.

The Frameworks are generic and use much more resources than you’re really need for a fast reply.

Many times using a heavy Framework has a cost of factor times, compared to use simply PHP.

Save database connections until really needed

Many Frameworks create a connection to the Database Server by default. But certain parts of your code application do not require to connect to the database.

For example, validating the data from a form. If there are missing fields, the PHP will not operate with the Database, just return an error via JSon or refreshing the page, informing that the required field is missing.

If a not logged user is requesting the dashboard page, there is no need to open a connection to the database (unless you want to write the access try to an error log in the database).

In fact opening connections by default makes easier for attackers to do DoS attacks.

With a Singleton pattern you can easily implement a Db class that handles this transparently for you.

Scaling out / Multi Server Environment

Memcached session

When you have several Web Servers you’ll need something more flexible than the default PHP handler (that stores to a file in the Web Server).

The most common is to store the Session, serialized, in a Memcached Cluster.

Use Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is a NoSql database that allows to Scale out very easily.

The main advantage is that scales linearly. If you have 4 nodes and add 4 more, your performance will be doubled. It has no single point of failure, is also resilient to node failures, it replicates the data among the nodes, splits the load over the nodes automatically and support distributed datacenter architectures.

To know more abiut NoSql and Cassandra, read my article: Upgrade your scalability with NoSql. And to start developing with Cassandra in PHP, python or Java read my contributed article: Begin developing with Cassandra.

Use MySql primary and secondaries

A easy way to split the load is to have a MySql primary Server, that handles the writes, and MySql secondary (or Slave) Servers handling the reads.

Every write sent to the Master is replicated into the Slaves. Then your application reads from the slaves.

You have to tell your code to do the writes to database to the primary Server, and the reads to the secondaries. You can have a Load Balancer so your code always ask the Load Balancer for the reads and it makes the connection to the less used server.

Do Database sharding

To shard the data consist into splitting the data according to a criteria.

For example, imagine we have 8 MySql Servers, named mysql0 to mysql7. If we want to insert or read data for user 1714, then the Server will be chosen from dividing the user_id, so 1714, between the number of Servers, and getting the MOD.

blog-carlesmateo-com-mod-for-sharding

So 1714 % 8 gives 2. This means that the MySql Server to use is the mysql2.

For the user_id 16: 16 & 8 gives 0, so we would use mysql0. And so.

You can shard according to the email, or other fields as well. And you can have the same master and secondaries for the shards also.

When doing sharding in MySql you cannot do joins to data in other Servers. (but you can replicate all the data from the several shards in one big server in house, in your offices, and so query it and join if you need that for marketing purposes).

I always use my own sharding, but there is a very nice product from CodeFutures called dbshards. It handles the traffics transparently. I used it when in a video games Start up with very satisfying result.

Use Cassandra assync queries

Cassandra support asynchronous queries. That means you can send the query to the Server, and instead of waiting, do other jobs. And check for the result later, when is finished.

Consider using Hadoop + HBASE

A Cluster alternative to Cassandra.

Use a Load Balancer

You can put a Load Balancer or a Reverse Proxy in front of your Web Servers. The Load Balancer knows the state of the Web Servers, so it will remove a Web Server from the Array if it stops responding and everything will continue being served to the users transparently.

There are many ways to do Load Balancing: Round Robin, based on the load on the Web Servers, on the number of connections to each Web Server, by cookie…

To use a Cookie based Load Balancer is a very easy way to split the load for WordPress and Drupal Servers.

Imagine you have 10 Web Servers. In the .htaccess they set a rule to set a Cookie like:

SERVER_ID=WEB01

That was in the case of the first Web Server.

Second Server would have in the .htaccess to set a Cookie like:

SERVER_ID=WEB02

Etcetera

When for first time an user connects to the Load Balancer it sends the user to one of the 10 Web Servers. Then the Web Server sends its cookie to the browser of the Client. E.g. WEB07

After that, in the next requests from the client it will be redirected to the server by the Load Balancer to the Server that set the Cookie, so in this example WEB07.

The nice thing of this way of splitting the traffic is that you don’t have to change your code, nor handling the Sessions different.

If you use two Load Balancers you can have a heartbeat process in them and a Virtual Ip, and so in case your main Load Balancer become irresponsible the Virtual Ip will be mapping to the second Load Balancer in milliseconds. That provides HA.

Use http accelerators

Nginx, varnish, squid… to serve static content and offload the PHP Web Servers.

Auto-Scale in the Cloud

If you use the Cloud you can easily set Auto-Scaling for different parts of your core.

A quick win is to Scale the Web Servers.

As in the Cloud you pay per hour using a computer, you will benefit from cost reduction in you stop using the servers when you don’t need them, and you add more Servers when more users are coming to your sites.

Video game companies are a good example of hours of plenty use and valleys with few users, although as users come from all the planet it is most and most diluted.

Some cool tools to Auto-Scaling are: ECManaged, RightScale, Amazon CloudWatch.

Use Google Cloud

Actually the Performance of the Google Cloud to Scale without any precedent is great.

Opposite to other Clouds that are based on instances, Google Cloud offers the platform, that will spawn your code across so many servers as needed, transparently to you. It’s a black box.

Schedule operations with RabbitMQ

Or other Queue Manager.

The idea is to send the jobs to the Queue Manager, the PHP will continue working, and the jobs will be performed asynchronously and notify the end.

RabbitMQ is cool also because it can work in cluster and HA.

Use GlusterFs for NAS

GlusterFs (and other products) allow you to have a Distributed File System, that splits the load and the data across the Servers, and resist node failures.

If you have to have a shared folder for the user’s uploads, for example for the profile pictures, to have the PHP and general files locally in the Servers and the Shared folder in a GlusterFs is a nice option.

Avoid NFS for PHP files and config files

As told before try to have the PHP files in a RAM disk, or in the local disk (Linux caches well and also OpCache), and try to not write code that reads files from disk for determining config setup.

I remember a Start up incubator that had a very nice Server, but the PHP files were read from a mounted NFS folder.

That meant that on every request, the Server had to go over the network to fetch the files.

Sadly for the project’s performance the PHP was reading a file called ENVIRONMENT that contained “PROD” or “DEVEL”. And this was done in every single request.

Even worst, I discovered that the switch connecting the Web Server and the NFS Server was a cheap 10 Mbit one. So all the traffic was going at 10 Mbit/s. Nice bottleneck.

Improve your network architecture

You can use 10 GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) to connect the Servers. The Web Servers to the Databases, Memcached Cluster, Load Balancers, Storage, etc…

You will need 10 GbE cards and 10 GbE switchs supporting bonding.

Use bonding to aggregate 10 + 10 so having 20 Gigabit.

You can also use Fibre Channel, for example 10 Gb and aggregate them, like  10 + 10 so 20 Gbit for the connection between the Servers and the Storage.

The performance improvements that your infrastructure will experiment are amazing.

Begin developing with Cassandra

This article is contributed to Luna Cloud blog by Carles Mateo.

We architects, developers and start ups are facing new challenges.

We have now to create applications that have to scale and scale at world-wide level.

That puts over the table big and exciting challenges.

To allow that increasing level of scaling, we designed and architect tools and techniques and tricks, but fortunately now there are great products born to scale out and to deal with this problems: like NoSql databases like Cassandra, MongoDb, Riak, Hadoop’s Hbase, Couchbase or CouchDb, NoSql in-Memory like Memcached or Redis, big data solutions like Hadoop, distributed files systems like Hadoop’s HDFS, GlusterFs, Lustre, etc…

In this article I will cover the first steps to develop with Cassandra, under the Developer point of view.

As a first view you may be interested in Cassandra because:

  • Is a Database with no single point of failure
  • Where all the Database Servers work in Peer to Peer over Tcp/Ip
  • Fault-tolerance. You can set replication factor, and the data will be sharded and replicated over different servers and so being resilient to node failures
  • Because the Cassandra Cluster splits and balances the work across the Cluster automatically
  • Because you can scale by just adding more nodes to the Cluster, that’s scaling horizontally, and it’s linear. If you double the number of servers, you double the performance
  • Because you can have cool configurations like multi-datacenter and multi-rack and have the replication done automatically
  • You can have several small, cheap, commodity servers, with big SATA disks with better result than one very big, very expensive, and unable-to-scale-more server with SSD or SAS expensive disks.
  • It has the CQL language -Cassandra Query Language-, that is close to SQL
  • Ability to send querys in async mode (the CPU can do other things while waiting for the query to return the results)

Cassandra is based in key/value philosophy but with columns. It supports multiple columns. That’s cool, as theoretically it supports 2 GB per column (at practical level is not recommended to go with data so big, specially in multi-user environments).

I will not lie to you: It is another paradigm, and comes with a lot of knowledge to acquire, but it is necessary and a price worth to pay for being able of scaling at nowadays required levels.

Cassandra only offers native drivers for: Java, .NET, C++ and Python 2.7. The rest of solutions are contributed, sadly most of them are outdated and unmantained.

You can find all the drivers here:

http://planetcassandra.org/client-drivers-tools/

To develop with PHP

Cassandra has no PHP driver officially, but has some contributed solutions.

By myself I created several solutions: CQLSÍ uses cqlsh to perform queries and interfaces without needing Thrift, and Cassandra Universal Driver is a Web Gateway that I wrote in Python that allows you to query Cassandra from any language, and recently I contributed to a PHP driver that speaks the Cassandra binary protocol (v1) directly using Tcp/Ip sockets.

That’s the best solution for me by now, as it is the fastest and it doesn’t need any third party library nor Thrift neither.

You can git clone it from:

https://github.com/uri2x/php-cassandra

Here we go with some samples:

Create a keyspace

KeySpace is the equivalent to a database in MySQL.

<?php

require_once 'Cassandra/Cassandra.php';

$o_cassandra = new Cassandra();

$s_server_host     = '127.0.0.1';    // Localhost
$i_server_port     = 9042; 
$s_server_username = '';  // We don't use username
$s_server_password = '';  // We don't use password
$s_server_keyspace = '';  // We don't have created it yet

$o_cassandra->connect($s_server_host, $s_server_username, $s_server_password, $s_server_keyspace, $i_server_port);

// Create a Keyspace with Replication factor 1, that's for a single server
$s_cql = "CREATE KEYSPACE cassandra_tests WITH REPLICATION = { 'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 1 };";

$st_results = $o_cassandra->query($s_cql);

We can run it from web or from command line by using:

php -f cassandra_create.php

Create a table

<?php

require_once 'Cassandra/Cassandra.php';

$o_cassandra = new Cassandra();

$s_server_host     = '127.0.0.1';    // Localhost
$i_server_port     = 9042; 
$s_server_username = '';  // We don't use username
$s_server_password = '';  // We don't use password
$s_server_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests';

$o_cassandra->connect($s_server_host, $s_server_username, $s_server_password, $s_server_keyspace, $i_server_port);

$s_cql = "CREATE TABLE carles_test_table (s_thekey text, s_column1 text, s_column2 text,PRIMARY KEY (s_thekey));";

$st_results = $o_cassandra->query($s_cql);

If we don’t plan to insert UTF-8 strings, we can use VARCHAR instead of TEXT type.

Do an insert

In this sample we create an Array of 100 elements, we serialize it, and then we store it.

<?php

require_once 'Cassandra/Cassandra.php';

// Note this code uses the MT notation http://blog.carlesmateo.com/maria-teresa-notation-for-php/
$i_start_time = microtime(true);

$o_cassandra = new Cassandra();

$s_server_host     = '127.0.0.1';    // Localhost
$i_server_port     = 9042; 
$s_server_username = '';  // We don't have username
$s_server_password = '';  // We don't have password
$s_server_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests';  

$o_cassandra->connect($s_server_host, $s_server_username, $s_server_password, $s_server_keyspace, $i_server_port);

$s_time = strval(time()).strval(rand(0,9999));
$s_date_time = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// An array to hold a emails
$st_data_emails = Array();

for ($i_bucle=0; $i_bucle<100; $i_bucle++) {
    // Add a new email
    $st_data_emails[] = Array('datetime'  => $s_date_time,
                              'id_email'  => $s_time);

}

// Serialize the Array
$s_data_emails = serialize($st_data_emails);

$s_cql = "INSERT INTO carles_test_table (s_thekey, s_column1, s_column2)
VALUES ('first_sample', '$s_data_emails', 'Some other data');";

$st_results = $o_cassandra->query($s_cql);

$o_cassandra->close();

print_r($st_results);

$i_finish_time = microtime(true);
$i_execution_time = $i_finish_time-$i_start_time;

echo 'Execution time: '.$i_execution_time."\n";
echo "\n";

This insert took Execution time: 0.0091850757598877 seconds executed from CLI (Command line).

If the INSERT works well you’ll have a [result] => ‘success’ in the resulting array.

cassandra-php-insert-result-success

Do some inserts

Here we do 9000 inserts.

<?php

require_once 'Cassandra/Cassandra.php';

// Note this code uses the MT notation http://blog.carlesmateo.com/maria-teresa-notation-for-php/
$i_start_time = microtime(true);

$o_cassandra = new Cassandra();

$s_server_host     = '127.0.0.1';    // Localhost
$i_server_port     = 9042; 
$s_server_username = '';  // We don't have username
$s_server_password = '';  // We don't have password
$s_server_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests';  

$o_cassandra->connect($s_server_host, $s_server_username, $s_server_password, $s_server_keyspace, $i_server_port);

$s_date_time = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

for ($i_bucle=0; $i_bucle<9000; $i_bucle++) {
    // Add a sample text, let's use time for example
    $s_time = strval(time());

    $s_cql = "INSERT INTO carles_test_table (s_thekey, s_column1, s_column2)
VALUES ('$i_bucle', '$s_time', 'http://blog.carlesmateo.com');";

    // Launch the query
    $st_results = $o_cassandra->query($s_cql);

}

$o_cassandra->close();

$i_finish_time = microtime(true);
$i_execution_time = $i_finish_time-$i_start_time;

echo 'Execution time: '.$i_execution_time."\n";
echo "\n";

Those 9,000 INSERTs takes 6.49 seconds in my test virtual machine, executed from CLI (Command line).

cqlsh-loaded-9000-rows-select-limit-10

Do a Select

<?php

require_once 'Cassandra/Cassandra.php';

// Note this code uses the MT notation http://blog.carlesmateo.com/maria-teresa-notation-for-php/
$i_start_time = microtime(true);

$o_cassandra = new Cassandra();

$s_server_host     = '127.0.0.1';    // Localhost
$i_server_port     = 9042; 
$s_server_username = '';  // We don't have username
$s_server_password = '';  // We don't have password
$s_server_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests';  

$o_cassandra->connect($s_server_host, $s_server_username, $s_server_password, $s_server_keyspace, $i_server_port);


$s_cql = "SELECT * FROM carles_test_table LIMIT 10;";

// Launch the query
$st_results = $o_cassandra->query($s_cql);
echo 'Printing 10 rows:'."\n";

print_r($st_results);

$o_cassandra->close();

$i_finish_time = microtime(true);
$i_execution_time = $i_finish_time-$i_start_time;

echo 'Execution time: '.$i_execution_time."\n";
echo "\n";

Printing 10 rows passing the query with LIMIT:

$s_cql = "SELECT * FROM carles_test_table LIMIT 10;";

echoing as array with print_r takes Execution time: 0.01090407371521 seconds (the cost of printing is high).

cassandra-php-select-limit-10

If you don’t print the rows, it takes only Execution time: 0.00714111328125 seconds.
Selecting 9,000 rows, if you don’t print them, takes Execution time: 0.18086194992065.

Java

The official driver for Java works very well.

The only initial difficulties may be to create the libraries required with Maven and to deal with the different Cassandra native data types.

To make that travel easy, I describe what you have to do to generate the libraries and provide you with a Db Class made by me that will abstract you from dealing with Data types and provide a simple ArrayList with the field names and all the data as String.

Datastax provides the pom.xml for maven so you’ll create you jar files. Then you can copy those jar file to Libraries folder of any project you want to use Cassandra with.

cmateo-cassandra-java-dependenciesMy Db class:

/*
 * By Carles Mateo blog.carlesmateo.com
 * You can use this code freely, or modify it.
 */

package server;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import com.datastax.driver.core.*;

/**
 * @author carles_mateo
 */
public class Db {

    public String[] s_cassandra_hosts = null;
    public String s_database = "cchat";
    
    public Cluster o_cluster = null;
    public Session o_session = null;
    
    Db() {
        // The Constructor
        this.s_cassandra_hosts = new String[10];
        
        String s_cassandra_server = "127.0.0.1";
        
        this.s_cassandra_hosts[0] = s_cassandra_server;
        
        this.o_cluster = Cluster.builder()
                                        .addContactPoints(s_cassandra_hosts[0]) // More than 1 separated by comas
                                        .build();
        this.o_session = this.o_cluster.connect(s_database);  // This is the KeySpace

    }
    
    public static String escapeApostrophes(String s_cql) {
        String s_cql_replaced = s_cql.replaceAll("'", "''");
        
        return s_cql_replaced;
    }
    
    public void close() {
        // Destructor calles by the garbagge collector
        this.o_session.close();
        this.o_cluster.close();
    }
    
    public ArrayList query(String s_cql) {
        
        ResultSet rows = null;
        
        rows = this.o_session.execute(s_cql);
        
        ArrayList st_results = new ArrayList();
        List<String> st_column_names = new ArrayList<String>();
        List<String> st_column_types = new ArrayList<String>();

        ColumnDefinitions o_cdef = rows.getColumnDefinitions();

        int i_num_columns = o_cdef.size();
        for (int i_columns = 0; i_columns < i_num_columns; i_columns++) {
            st_column_names.add(o_cdef.getName(i_columns));
            st_column_types.add(o_cdef.getType(i_columns).toString());                
        }                
        
        st_results.add(st_column_names);
        
        for (Row o_row : rows) {
            
            List<String> st_data = new ArrayList<String>();
            for (int i_column=0; i_column<i_num_columns; i_column++) {
                if (st_column_types.get(i_column).equals("varchar") || st_column_types.get(i_column).equals("text")) {
                    st_data.add(o_row.getString(i_column));
                } else if (st_column_types.get(i_column).equals("timeuuid")) {
                    st_data.add(o_row.getUUID(i_column).toString());
                } else if (st_column_types.get(i_column).equals("integer")) {
                    st_data.add(String.valueOf(o_row.getInt(i_column)));
                }
                // TODO: Implement other data types
                
            }
            st_results.add(st_data);
           
        }
        
        return st_results;
        
    }
    
    public static String getFieldFromRow(ArrayList st_results, int i_row, String s_fieldname) {
        
        List<String> st_column_names = (List)st_results.get(0);
        
        boolean b_column_found = false;
        
        int i_column_pos = 0;
        
        for (String s_column_name : st_column_names) {
            if (s_column_name.equals(s_fieldname)) {
                b_column_found = true;
                break;
            }
            i_column_pos++;
        }
        
        if (b_column_found == false) {
            return null;
        }
        
        int i_num_columns = st_results.size();
        
        List<String> st_data = (List)st_results.get(i_row);
        
        String s_data = st_data.get(i_column_pos);
        
        return s_data;
    }
    
}

 

Python 2.7

There is no currently driver for Python 3. I requested Datastax and they told me that they are working in a new driver for Python 3.

To work with Datastax’s Python 2.7 driver:

1) Download the driver from http://planetcassandra.org/client-drivers-tools/ or git clone from https://github.com/datastax/python-driver

2) Install the dependencies for the Datastax’s driver

Install python-pip (Installer)

sudo apt-get install python-pip

Install python development tools

sudo apt-get install python-dev

This is required for some of the libraries used by original Cassandra driver.

Install Cassandra driver required libraries

sudo pip install futures
sudo pip install blist
sudo pip install metrics
sudo pip install scales

Query Cassandra from Python

The problem is the same as with Java, the different data types are hard to deal with.
So I created a function convert_to_string that converts known data types to String, and so later we will only deal with Strings.

In this sample, the results of the query are rendered in xml or in html.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
# Use with Python 2.7+

__author__ = 'Carles Mateo'
__blog__ = 'http://blog.carlesmateo.com'

import sys

from cassandra import ConsistencyLevel
from cassandra.cluster import Cluster
from cassandra.query import SimpleStatement

s_row_separator = u"||*||"
s_end_of_row = u"//*//"
s_data = u""

b_error = 0
i_error_code = 0
s_html_output = u""
b_use_keyspace = 1 # By default use keyspace
b_use_user_and_password = 1 # Not implemented yet

def return_success(i_counter, s_data, s_format = 'html'):
    i_error_code = 0
    s_error_description = 'Data returned Ok'

    return_response(i_error_code, s_error_description, i_counter, s_data, s_format)
    return

def return_error(i_error_code, s_error_description, s_format = 'html'):
    i_counter = 0
    s_data = ''

    return_response(i_error_code, s_error_description, i_counter, s_data, s_format)
    return

def return_response(i_error_code, s_error_description, i_counter, s_data, s_format = 'html'):

    if s_format == 'xml':
        print ("Content-Type: text/xml")
        print ("")
        s_html_output = u"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>"
        s_html_output = s_html_output + '<response>' \
                                        '<status>' \
                                        '<error_code>' + str(i_error_code) + '</error_code>' \
                                        '<error_description>' + '<![CDATA[' + s_error_description + ']]>' + '</error_description>' \
                                        '<rows_returned>' + str(i_counter) + '</rows_returned>' \
                                        '</status>' \
                                        '<data>' + s_data + '</data>' \
                                        '</response>'
    else:
        print("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8")
        print("")
        s_html_output = str(i_error_code)
        s_html_output = s_html_output + '\n' + s_error_description + '\n'
        s_html_output = s_html_output + str(i_counter) + '\n'
        s_html_output = s_html_output + s_data + '\n'

    print(s_html_output.encode('utf-8'))
    sys.exit()
    return

def convert_to_string(s_input):
    # Convert other data types to string

    s_output = s_input

    try:
        if value is not None:

            if isinstance(s_input, unicode):
                # string unicode, do nothing
                return s_output

            if isinstance(s_input, (int, float, bool, set, list, tuple, dict)):
                # Convert to string
                s_output = str(s_input)
                return s_output

            # This is another type, try to convert
            s_output = str(input)
            return s_output

        else:
            # is none
            s_output = ""
            return s_output

    except Exception as e:
        # Were unable to convert to str, will return as empty string
        s_output = ""

    return s_output

def convert_to_utf8(s_input):
    return s_input.encode('utf-8')

# ********************
# Start of the program
# ********************

s_format = 'xml'  # how you want this sample program to output

s_cql = 'SELECT * FROM test_table;'
s_cluster = '127.0.0.1'
s_port = "9042" # default port
i_port = int(s_port)

b_use_keyspace = 1
s_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests'
if s_keyspace == '':
    b_use_keyspace = 0

s_user = ''
s_password = ''
if s_user == '' or s_password == '':
    b_use_user_and_password = 0

try:
    cluster = Cluster([s_cluster], i_port)
    session = cluster.connect()
except Exception as e:
    return_error(200, 'Cannot connect to cluster ' + s_cluster + ' on port ' + s_port + '.' + e.message, s_format)

if (b_use_keyspace == 1):
    try:
        session.set_keyspace(s_keyspace)
    except:
        return_error(210, 'Keyspace ' + s_keyspace + ' does not exist', s_format)

try:
    o_results = session.execute_async(s_cql)
except Exception as e:
    return_error(300, 'Error executing query. ' + e.message, s_format)

try:
    rows = o_results.result()
except Exception as e:
    return_error(310, 'Query returned result error. ' + e.message, s_format)

# Query returned values
i_counter = 0
try:
    if rows is not None:
        for row in rows:
            i_counter = i_counter + 1

            if i_counter == 1 and s_format == 'html':
                # first row is row titles
                for key, value in vars(row).iteritems():
                    s_data = s_data + key + s_row_separator

                s_data = s_data + s_end_of_row

            if s_format == 'xml':
                s_data = s_data + ''

            for key, value in vars(row).iteritems():
                # Convert to string numbers or other types
                s_value = convert_to_string(value)
                if s_format == 'xml':
                    s_data = s_data + '<' + key + '>' + '<![CDATA[' + s_value + ']]>' + ''
                else:
                    s_data = s_data + s_value
                    s_data = s_data + s_row_separator


            if s_format == 'xml':
                s_data = s_data + ''
            else:
                s_data = s_data + s_end_of_row

except Exception as e:
    # No iterable data
    return_success(i_counter, s_data, s_format)

# Just print the data
return_success(i_counter, s_data, s_format)

cassandra-lunacloud-sample-py

If you did not create the namespace like in the samples before, change those lines to:

s_cql = 'CREATE KEYSPACE cassandra_tests WITH REPLICATION = { \'class\': \'SimpleStrategy\', \'replication_factor\': 1 };'
s_cluster = '127.0.0.1'
s_port = "9042" # default port
i_port = int(s_port)

b_use_keyspace = 1
s_keyspace = ''

Run the program to create the Keyspace and you’ll get:

carles@ninja8:~/Desktop/codi/python/test$ ./lunacloud-create.py 
Content-Type: text/xml

<error_code>0<error_description>

Then you can create the table simply by setting:

s_cql = 'CREATE TABLE test_table (s_thekey text, s_column1 text, s_column2 text,PRIMARY KEY (s_thekey));'
s_cluster = '127.0.0.1'
s_port = "9042" # default port
i_port = int(s_port)

b_use_keyspace = 1
s_keyspace = 'cassandra_tests'

IDE PyCharm Community Edition

Cassandra Universal Driver

As mentioned above if you use a language Tcp/Ip enabled very new, or very old like ASP or ColdFusion, or from Unix command line and you want to use it with Cassandra, you can use my solution http://www.cassandradriver.com/.

cassandradriver-v1-1-xml-sample

It is basically a Web Gateway able to speak XML, JSon or CSV alike. It relies on the official Datastax’s python driver.

It is not so fast as a native driver, but it works pretty well and allows you to split your architecture in interesting ways, like intermediate layers to restrict even more security (For example WebServers may query the gateway, that will enstrict tome permissions instead of having direct access to the Cassandra Cluster. That can also be used to perform real-time map-reduce operations on the amount of data returned by the Cassandras, so freeing the webservers from that task and saving CPU).

Tip: If you use Cassandra for Development only, you can limit the amount of memory used by editing the file /etc/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh and hardcoding:

    # limit the memory for development environment
    # --------------------------------------------
    system_memory_in_mb="512"
    system_cpu_cores="1"
    # --------------------------------------------

Just before the line:

# set max heap size based on the following

That way Cassandra will believe your system memory is 512 MB and reserve only 256 MB for its use.

The Cloud is for Scaling

Last Update: 2022-08-03 I added the Enterprises, as more and more services have been provided by Amazon and the other major Cloud Providers and they offer a suitable solution for Enterprises requiring high availability in services managed by Amazon, without the need to configure and maintain their own setups manually.

dell-blades-m4110The Cloud is for Startups, and for Scaling. Nothing more.

In the future will be used by phone operators, to re-dimension their infrastructure and bandwidth in real time according to demand, but nowadays the Cloud is for Startups.

Examine the prices in my post in cmips, take a look, examine the performance also of the different CPU. You see that according to CMIPS v.1.03 a Desktop Processor Intel i7-4770S, worth USD $300, performs better than an Amazon M2 High Memory Quadruple Extra Large and than a Rackspace First gen. 30 GB RAM 8 Cores?.

Today the public cost of an Amazon M2 High Memory Quadruple Extra Large running for a month is USD $1,180.80 so USD $1.64 per hour and the Rackspace First Generation 30 GB RAM 8 Cores 1200 GB of disk costs is USD $1,425.60 so USD $1.98 per hour running.

And that’s the key, the cost per hour.

Because the greatness, the majesty of the Cloud is that you pay per hour, you pay as you need, or as you go. No attaching contracts. All on demand.

I had my company at a time where the hosting companies and the Data Centers were forcing customers to sign yearly contracts. What if a company only needs to host their Servers for three months? What if they have to close?. No options. You take it or you leave it.

Even renting a dedicated hosting was for at least a month or more, and what if the latency was not good? What if the bandwidth of the provider was not enough?.

Amazon irrupted in the market with strength. I really like that company because they grew the best eCommerce company for buying books, they did a system that really worked, and was able to recommend very useful computer books, and the delivery, logistics was so good, also post-sales service. They simply started to rent the same infrastructure they were using to attend their millions of customers and was a total success.

And for a while few people knew about Amazon deep technologies and functionalities, but later became a fashion.

Now people is using Amazon or whatever provider/Service that contains the word “Cloud” because the Cloud is in the mouth of everyone. Magazines and newspapers speak about the Cloud, so many many companies use it simply because everyone is talking about the Cloud. And those ISP that didn’t had a Cloud have invested heavily to create a Cloud, just because they didn’t want to be the ones without a Cloud, since everyone was asking for it and all the ISP companies were offering their “Clouds”.

Every company claims to have “Cloud” where the only many of them have is Vmware servers, Xen servers, Open Stack… running the tenants or instances of the customers always on the same host servers. No real Cloud, professional Cloud, abstract layered in a Professional way like Amazon, only the traditional “shared hosting” with another name, sharing CPU and RAM and Disk storage using virtual machines called instances.

So, Cloud fashion has become a confusing craziness where no one knows why they are in the Cloud but they believe they have to be in.

But do companies need the Cloud?. Cloud instances?

It depends. The best would be to ask that companies Why you choose the Cloud?.

If you compare the cost of having an instance in the Cloud, is much much more expensive than having a dedicated server. And for that high cost you don’t get more performance.

Virtualization is always slower and disk speed is always an issue in Cloud providers, where all the data travels via network from the disk cabins NAS to the Host servers running the guest instances. Data cannot be at local disks, since every time you start an instance, the resources like CPU and RAM are provisioned, and your instance run in totally different hardware. Only your data remain in the NAS (Network Attached Storage).

So unless you run your in-the-Cloud instance in a special provider that offers local disks, like DigitalOcean that offers SSD but monthly paying, (and so you pay the price by losing the hardware abstraction capability because you’re attached to the CPU that has the disk connected, and also you loss the flexibility of paying per hour of use, as you go), then you’ll face a bottleneck that is the hard disk performance (that for real takes all the data from NAS, where is stored, through the local network).

So what are the motivations to use the Cloud?. I try to put some examples, out of these it has no much sense, I think. You can send me your happy-in-Cloud scenarios if you found other good uses.

Example A) Saving initial costs, avoid contract attachment and grow easily own-made

Imagine a Developer that start its own project. May be it works, may be not, but instead of having a monthly contract for a dedicated server, he starts with an Amazon Free Tier (better not, use Small instance at least) and runs a web. If it does not work, simply stop the instance and pay no more. If the project works and has more and more users he can re-dimension the server with a click. Just stop the instance, change the type of instance, start it again with more RAM and more CPU power. Fast.

Hiring a dedicated server implies at least monthly contracts, average of USD $100 per month, and is not easy to move to a bigger server, not fast and is expensive as it requires the ISP tech guys to move the data, to migrate from a Server to another.

Also the available bandwidth is to be taken in consideration. Bandwidth is expensive and Amazon can offer 150 Mbit to smaller machines. Not all the Internet Service Providers can offer that bandwidth even with most advanced packets.

If the project still grows, with a click, in seconds, 20 instances with a lot of bandwidth can be deployed and serving traffic to your customers very quick.

You save the init costs of buying Servers, and the time to deal with hardware, bandwidth limitations and avoid contracts, but you pay an hourly rate a lot more expensive. So in the long run is much much expensive using Amazon and less powerful than having dedicated servers. That happened to Zynga, that was paying $63M annually to Amazon and decided to step back from Amazon to their own Data Centers again. (another fortune tech link)

The limited CPU power was also a deal breaker for many companies that needed really powerful CPU and gigs of RAM for their Database Servers. Now this situation is much better with the introduction of the new Servers.

This developer can benefit from doing bacups with a click, cloning, starting instances from an image, having more static ip’s with a click, deploying built-in (from the Cloud provider) load balancers, using monitoring services like CloudWatch, creating Volumes and attaching to the servers for additional space…

Example B) An Startup with fluctuating number of users and hopes of growing

Imagine an Startup with a wonderful Facebook Application.

During 80% of the day has few visits, may be only need 3 Servers, but during 20% of the hours of the day from 10:00 to 15:00 users connect like hell, so they need 20 servers to attend this traffic and workload, and may be tomorrow needs 30 servers.

With the Cloud they pay for 3 servers 24 hours per day and for the other 17 servers only pay the hours they are on, that’s 5 hours per day. Doing that they save money and they have an unlimited * amount of power. (* There are limits for real, you have to specially request authorisation to run more than default max. servers for the zone, that is normally 20 instances for Amazon. Also it can happen theoretically that when you request new instances the Zone has no instances available).

So well, for an Startup growing, avoiding hiring 20 dedicated servers and instead running into the Cloud as many as they need, for just the time they need, Auto-Scaling up and down, and can use the servers NOW and pay the next month with Visa card, all of that can make a difference for a growing Startup.

If the servers chosen are not powerful enough that is solved with a click, changing instance type. So fast. A minute.

It’s only a matter of money.

Example C) e-Learning companies and online universities

e-Learning platforms also get benefits from the Auto-Scaling for the full occupation hours.

The built-in functionalities of the Cloud to clone instances is very useful to deploy new web servers, or new environments for students doing practices, in the case of teaching Information Technology subjects, where the users need to practice against a real server (Linux or windows).

Those servers can be created and destroyed, cloned from the main -ready to go- template. And also servers can be scheduled to stop at a certain hour and to start also, so saving the money from the hours not needed.

Example D) Digital agencies, sports and other events

When there is an Special event, like motorcycle running, when a Football Team scores, when there is an spot in tv announcing a product…

At those moments the traffic to the site can multiply, so more servers and more bandwidth have to be deployed instantly. That cannot be done with physical servers, hardware, but is very easy to provision instances from the Cloud.

Mass mailing email campaigns can also benefit from creating new Servers when needed.

Example E) Proximity and SEO

Cloud providers have Data Centres everywhere. If you want to have servers in Asia, or static content to be deployed faster, or in South-America, or in Europe… the Cloud providers have plenty of Data Centers all over the world.

Example F) Game aficionado and friends sharing contents

People that loves cooperative games can find the needed hungry bandwidth and at a moderate price. If they run their private server few hours, at night, from 22:00 to 01:00 as example, they will benefit from a great bandwidth from the big Cloud provider and pay only 3 hours per day (the exceed of traffic uses to be paid in most providers, but price of additional GB uses to be really really competitive).

Friends sharing contents in an Ftp also, can benefit from this Cloud servers, but probably they will find more easy to use services like Dropbox.

Example G) Startup serving contents

An Startup serving videos, images, or books, can benefit not only from the great bandwidth of big Cloud providers (this has been covered before), but for a very cheap price for exceeding Gigabyte transferred.

Local ISP can’t offer 150 Mbit for an instance of USD $20 and USD $0.12 per additional GB transferred.

Many Cloud providers also allow unlimited incoming traffic from the Internet, and from Server to Server through private ip’s.

Example H) Enterprises that want to outsource the solutions and having better availability

Since I wrote this article in 2013, many CSP have been incorporation more and more powerful services to their catalalog.

For instance Amazon has service like DynamoDB, RDS, Load Balancers able to balance servers in different availability zones, with Auto-Scaling, SQS for Message Queues, ElastiCache, Lambda, S3…

Many Enterprise find convenient to have all their services offloaded to Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure… so they require less Operations and System Administration Engineers.

Other cases

For other cases Dedicated Servers are much more Powerful, faster and cheaper, at the price of being “static” in the sense of attached, not layer abstracted, but all the aspects of your Project have to be taken in count before deciding stepping into or out of the Cloud.

In general terms I would say that the Cloud is for Scaling, but in 2022 it’s also to outsource Operation Services, to fully managed services by the CSPs.

Why Cloud is not optional

data-center-companyIf you’re a Developer or an Entrepreneur to avoid Cloud is not an option.

It is a must to use the Cloud.

Why?.

Because if your project is a success, you’ll need to scale very fast from a single server to many, just to attend the increasing number of users.

And if you have a lot of users, you’ll need a lot of bandwidth.

Even if you have a single server, but want to serve video, will need a lot of bandwidth to serve data fast.

Here is where Cloud is not an option. It’s a must.

If you use a big server with a lot of RAM or CPUs, or several servers, Amazon EC2 is very expensive.

But to start with the needed power, and to be able to grow really fast, and to pay as you go there is no other option.

The smaller instance from Amazon, is able to serve 150 Mbit per second.

If you need to serve video, where would you be able to deliver it at 150 Mbit/sec rates at 17 € / 14.67 £ / US $23 per month?.

Nowhere else.

It’s not a matter of something fashion, there’s not alternative.

With the privative price of dedicated bandwidth in the data centres, no one else can offer something similar even for then times this price.

So if you need to be able to pass from a server to 20 or 100 with a click and within a minute, and you need to deliver contents very fast there is no other option.

With Amazon Cloud since you pay per hour, you can create 20 instances to face a rise of visitors, due to a campaign or because you have top visitors window of time, you can create instances as you need and destroy them when you don’t need them and pay only for the hours used.

So when your Start up is growing and low on money/resources, you save the costs of buying several physical server ($2,000 each), the time of installing, of replacing if a motherboard or disk crashes, and simply creating new instances in the Amazon Cloud as you need, and paying only for the time you use them.

So you can save the costs and grow as you need.

There are other benefits like you can use Amazon data centres in all-over the world, where the infrastructure is closer to your customers (reducing the latency and increasing the speed of servicing pages), the CDN service, load balancers…

The cost of the transferred Gigabyte is another reason.

One month I transferred 287 GB and paid only $50.

An small ISP can’t beat this nor even compete with this price and speed.