Am 24.04.2020 um 16:21 schrieb Joe Orton:
On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 12:17:19PM +0200, Rainer Jung wrote:
Thinking further: I think it would make sense to have a module or core
implement the monitor hook to generate that derived data (requests/sec,
bytes/sec, durationMs/request, avgConcurrency) in the last monitor interval
and to provide that data to consumers like mod_systemd or - new - mod_status
- instead of the long term averages since start. It could probably be added
to the code that already provides "sload". That way mod_status would also
profit from the more precise average values (taken over the last monitor
interval).

I definitely like the patch, it has bothered me that the "per second"
stats are not very useful but wasn't sure how to make it better.

This is also an interesting idea.

So you would suggest having a new monitor hook which runs REALLY_LAST in
the order, calls ap_get_sload() and stores it in a global, and then we'd
have an ap_get_cached_sload() (or whatever) which gives you the cached
data from the last iteration?  Or are you thinking of a more
sophisticated API which does the "diff" between intervals internally?

Thanks for the positive feedback.

The averaged metrics IMHO only make sense as cached data, updated in regular intervals and provided for use by various modules (probably only mod_systemd and mod_status).

I would like to provide the already averaged data in a struct, each metric as a float or double. The bytes/request probably not already human readably scaled, because it makes its use less flexible. Since we already also have the absolute counters at that point, we can easily add them to the same struct as 32 or 64 bit counters and return a consistent set of data (five old values, five new values, five averages and two time stamps). [idle(32), busy(32), requests(64), bytes(64), duration(64); req/s, bytes/s, bytes/req, dur/s, dur/req]. So consumers needing a consistent view can get it.

Even more so since the absolute metrics are currently not cheap to access. We collect all of them by iterating over the scoreboard and summing up. By adding them to the cached data, the consuming code could decide, whether such near-time data is good enough or it needs to acquire new and curent counters. For mod_systemd, cached data (10 second interval) might be OK.

For some modules - like mod_status - cached averages are fine, but I think the counters should be correct for the point in time the status request was handled by the module. So the scoreboard statistics code in mod_status unfortunately would not go away.ยด, but the data quality for the averages would become better.

Implementation wise I am thinking about adding

  ap_hook_monitor(mon_avg_monitor, NULL, NULL, ???);

to server/util.c, which calculates the new averages and

  ap_get_mon_avg(ap_mon_avg_t *ma)

which returns the four averages in a struct similar to the existing ap_get_loadavg() and ap_get_sload().

We might have a little hassle to make the statistics update atomic/thread-safe (eg. two instances of the internal data struct, so that we only need to make the switch between them after the new calculation atomic).

About REALLY_LAST: why last? If other modules collect data via this API and wasn't to do it in the monitor hook as well, shouldn't run the caching of data REALLY_FIRST, so you get the new averages?

I'll try to draft and test something along these lines later today. Fun stuff. And more comments are very welcome.

And I like, that mod_status will profit by showing betrer averages as well.

Regards,

Rainer

Am 23.04.2020 um 21:29 schrieb Rainer Jung:
Hi all,

triggered by the new mod_systemd I drafted a patch to enhance the
monitoring data it provides during the monitor hook run.

Currently it publishes important data, like idle and busy slots and
total request count, but also not so useful info like requests/second
and bytes/second as a long term average (since start). These two figues
tend to become near constant after a longer time of operation.

Since the monitor hook of the module always seems to run in the same
(parent) process, it is easy to remember the previous request and byte
count data and average only over the last monitor hook interval. This
should give more meaningful data. And is a change local to mod_systemd.

In addition we have a third metric available in the scoreboard, namely
the total request duration. From that we can get the average request
duration and the average request concurrency. This part also needs a
change to the sload structure. Maybe we need a minor MMN bump for that.

I scetched a patch under

home.apache.org/~rjung/patches/httpd-trunk-mod_systemd-interval-stats.patch

Any comments, likes or dislikes?

Thanks and regards,

Rainer

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