lidavidm commented on code in PR #13873:
URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/13873#discussion_r951449151


##########
docs/source/cpp/flight.rst:
##########
@@ -172,6 +172,110 @@ request/response. On the server, they can inspect 
incoming headers and
 fail the request; hence, they can be used to implement custom
 authentication methods.
 
+.. _flight-best-practices:
+
+Best practices
+==============
+
+gRPC
+----
+
+When using default gRPC transport options can be passed to it via
+:member:`arrow::flight::FlightClientOptions::generic_options`. For example:
+
+.. code-block:: cpp
+
+   auto options = FlightClientOptions::Defaults();
+   // Set a very low limit at the gRPC layer to fail all calls
+   options.generic_options.emplace_back(GRPC_ARG_MAX_RECEIVE_MESSAGE_LENGTH, 
4);
+
+Also see `best gRPC practices`_ and available `gRPC keys`_.
+
+
+Re-use clients whenever possible
+--------------------------------
+
+Closing clients causes gRPC to close and clean up connections which can take
+several seconds per connection. This will stall server and client threads if
+done too frequently. Client reuse will avoid this issue.
+
+Don’t round-robin load balance
+------------------------------
+
+Round robin balancing can cause every client to have an open connection to
+every server causing an unexpected number of open connections and a depletion
+of resources.
+
+Debugging
+---------
+
+Use netstat to see the number of open connections.
+For debug - env GRPC_VERBOSITY=info GRPC_TRACE=http will print the initial
+headers (on both sides) so you can see if grpc established the connection or
+not. It will also print when a message is sent, so you can tell if the
+connection is open or not.
+Note: "connect" isn't really a connect and we’ve observed that gRPC does not
+give you the actual error until you first try to make a call. This can cause
+error being reported at unexpected times.
+
+Use ListFlights sparingly
+-------------------------
+
+ListFlights endpoint is largely just implemented as a normal GRPC stream
+endpoint and can hit transfer bottlenecks if used too much. To estimate data
+transfer bottleneck:
+5k schemas will serialize to about 1-5 MB/call. Assuming a gRPC localhost
+bottleneck of 3GB/s you can at best serve 600-3000 clients/s.
+
+ARROW-15764_ proposes a caching optimisation for server side, but it was not
+yet implemented.
+
+
+Memory cache client-side
+------------------------
+
+Flight uses gRPC allocator wherever possible.
+
+gRPC will spawn an unbounded number of threads for concurrent clients. Those
+threads are not necessarily cleaned up (cached thread pool in java parlance).
+glibc malloc clears some per thread state and the default tuning never clears
+caches in some workloads. But you can explicitly tell malloc to dump caches.
+See ARROW-16697_ as an example.
+
+A quick way of testing: attach to the process with a debugger and call 
malloc_trim
+
+
+Excessive traffic
+-----------------
+
+There are basically two ways to handle excessive traffic:
+* unbounded thread pool -> everyone gets serviced, but it might take forever.
+This is what you are seeing now.
+bounded thread pool -> Reject connections / requests when under load, and have
+clients retry with backoff. This also gives an opportunity to retry with a
+different node. Not everyone gets serviced but quality of service stays 
consistent.
+
+Closing unresponsive connections
+--------------------------------
+
+1. A stale connection can be closed using
+   :member:`arrow::flight::FlightClientOptions::stop_token`. This requires 
recording the
+   stop token at connection establishment time.

Review Comment:
   We can maybe merge this then add issues for moving each of these examples to 
the cookbook.



##########
docs/source/cpp/flight.rst:
##########
@@ -172,6 +172,154 @@ request/response. On the server, they can inspect 
incoming headers and
 fail the request; hence, they can be used to implement custom
 authentication methods.
 
+.. _flight-best-practices:
+
+Best practices
+==============
+
+gRPC
+----
+
+When using default gRPC transport options can be passed to it via
+:member:`arrow::flight::FlightClientOptions::generic_options`. For example:
+
+.. tab-set::
+
+   .. tab-item:: C++
+
+      .. code-block:: cpp
+
+         auto options = FlightClientOptions::Defaults();
+         // Set a very low limit at the gRPC layer to fail all calls
+         
options.generic_options.emplace_back(GRPC_ARG_MAX_RECEIVE_MESSAGE_LENGTH, 4);
+
+   .. tab-item:: Python
+
+      .. code-block:: cpp
+
+         // Set a very low limit at the gRPC layer to fail all calls
+         generic_options = [("GRPC_ARG_MAX_RECEIVE_MESSAGE_LENGTH", 4)]
+         client = pyarrow.flight.FlightClient(server_uri, 
generic_options=generic_options)
+
+Also see `best gRPC practices`_ and available `gRPC keys`_.
+
+Re-use clients whenever possible
+--------------------------------
+
+Closing clients causes gRPC to close and clean up connections which can take

Review Comment:
   Maybe word it more generically, ~"Creating and closing clients requires 
setup/teardown on the client and server which can take away from actually 
handling RPCs. Reuse clients whenever possible to avoid this. Note that clients 
are thread-safe."



##########
docs/source/cpp/flight.rst:
##########
@@ -172,6 +172,198 @@ request/response. On the server, they can inspect 
incoming headers and
 fail the request; hence, they can be used to implement custom
 authentication methods.
 
+.. _flight-best-practices:
+
+Best practices
+==============
+
+gRPC
+----
+
+When using default gRPC transport options can be passed to it via
+:member:`arrow::flight::FlightClientOptions::generic_options`. For example:
+
+.. tab-set::
+
+   .. tab-item:: C++
+
+      .. code-block:: cpp
+
+         auto options = FlightClientOptions::Defaults();
+         // Set the period after which a keepalive ping is sent on transport.
+         options.generic_options.emplace_back(GRPC_ARG_KEEPALIVE_TIME_MS, 
60000);
+
+   .. tab-item:: Python
+
+      .. code-block:: python
+
+         # Set the period after which a keepalive ping is sent on transport.
+         generic_options = [("GRPC_ARG_KEEPALIVE_TIME_MS", 60000)]
+         client = pyarrow.flight.FlightClient(server_uri, 
generic_options=generic_options)
+
+Also see `best gRPC practices`_ and available `gRPC keys`_.
+
+Re-use clients whenever possible
+--------------------------------
+
+Closing clients causes gRPC to close and clean up connections which can take
+several seconds per connection. This will stall server and client threads if
+done too frequently. Client reuse will avoid this issue.
+
+Don’t round-robin load balance
+------------------------------
+
+`Round robin load balancing`_ means every client can have an open connection to
+every server, causing an unexpected number of open connections and depleting
+server resources.
+
+Debugging disconnects
+---------------------
+
+When facing unexpected disconnects on long running connections use netstat to
+monitor the number of open connections. If number of connections is much
+greater than the number of clients it might cause issues.
+
+For debugging, certain environment variables enable logging in gRPC. For
+example, ``env GRPC_VERBOSITY=info GRPC_TRACE=http`` will print the initial
+headers (on both sides) so you can see if gRPC established the connection or
+not. It will also print when a message is sent, so you can tell if the
+connection is open or not.
+
+gRPC may not report connection errors until a call is actually made.
+Hence, to detect connection errors when creating a client, some sort
+of dummy RPC should be made.
+
+Memory management
+-----------------------
+
+Flight tries to reuse allocations made by gRPC to avoid redundant
+data copies. However, this means that those allocations may not
+be tracked by the Arrow memory pool, and that memory usage behavior,
+such as whether free memory is returned to the system, is dependent
+on the allocator that gRPC uses (usually the system allocator).
+
+A quick way of testing: attach to the process with a debugger and call
+malloc_trim, or call :func:`ReleaseUnused <arrow::MemoryPool::ReleaseUnused>`
+on the system pool. If memory usage drops, then likely, there is memory
+allocated by gRPC or by the application that the system allocator was holding
+on to. This can be adjusted in platform-specific ways; see an investigation
+in JIRA for an example of how this works on Linux/glibc.
+
+malloc can be explicitly told to dump caches. See ARROW-16697_ as an example.

Review Comment:
   glibc malloc?



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