On Sun, 15 Dec 2013, Otis Gospodnetic wrote:

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 3:36 AM, Radu Gheorghe <[email protected]>wrote:

Just my 2 cents here:
a lot earlier I came with a proposal go give a REST API that would
basically enable external applications to get messages from a rsyslog
queue:
http://bugzilla.adiscon.com/show_bug.cgi?id=482

With omrest, one should be able to use any programming language to pull
messages from rsyslog. For example, one could write a Kafka publisher (in
any language) that would pull messages from rsyslog and publish to Kafka.

I assume this is better than omprog because AFAIK with omprog piping to the
STDIN of a binary there's a tiny OS buffer (a pipe or something? this is
iffy territory for me) that may get full and you may lose messages if the
other app isn't fast enough. That, or you need to implement queues in your
external program. Which is duplicate work, queues are already in rsyslog.
With omrest (hypothetically), if you need more performance, you just need
to spawn more threads/processes to pull from the queue and push wherever.
Assuming you have the hardware.


I like the omrest idea because I like the ability for systems to pull at
their own speed and to upgrade more freely.

the problem is that rsyslog is stuck holding on to the messages until all possible clients have pulled the message. This is not a really good idea.

If the above issue were in Github I'd click the "Watch" button immediately
to get notified of any comments or activity around it.... but I'd have to
create yet another account in "somebody's Bugzilla", so I won't. (just
trying to illustrate the thinking that I bet many people go through in
similar situations).

Re omprog, does rsyslog launch the referenced binary for each message or
just launches the process once and keeps feeding it via stdin?

once and then feeds multiple messages (and relaunches it if it dies)

I'm no Linux/C programmer, so maybe this makes no sense, but would using
sendfile be appropriate here?

not really. sendfile is appropriate when you have a file that you are sending as-is with no modification to it.

David Lang

Thanks,
Otis
--
Performance Monitoring * Log Analytics * Search Analytics
Solr & Elasticsearch Support * http://sematext.com/


On the input side, one can already write connectors in any language. Just
make the thing push to any input rsyslog supports. For most use-cases,
rsyslog should pull from that input fast enough to avoid any issues.

Now the only problem with omrest is that it needs to be implemented :)
Which bumps into the 24h problem of people [who can actually do it].

Best regards,
Radu

2013/12/15 Otis Gospodnetic <[email protected]>

Hi,

Thanks for the info.
I was asking because having the ability to write ims and oms in different
languages would open a lot of opportunities.  This is one of those
"enablement" things.  I understand writing modules in other languages may
mean those using such modules may hurt performance, but some people need
certain functionality more than performance.

Take omkafka example from the other day.  If there were a way to write an
om in Java it's be trivial for a lot of Java developers out there to
contribute omkafka.

If omprog enables development of the ecosystem, it sounds like something
to
point out clearly somewhere and nurture that a bit.  I do see
http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/omprog.html because somebody shared a link,
but
I don't see that on http://www.rsyslog.com/doc or on
http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/dev_oplugins.html or in the new README.

Coincidentally, I just came across Fluentd's instructions for writing
plugins, which could serve as guidance:
http://docs.fluentd.org/articles/plugin-development .  Nice, clean, well
structured, not a lot of prose...

Otis
--
Performance Monitoring * Log Analytics * Search Analytics
Solr & Elasticsearch Support * http://sematext.com/


On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 1:39 PM, David Lang <[email protected]> wrote:

On Sat, 14 Dec 2013, RB wrote:

 On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 5:24 AM, Rainer Gerhards
<[email protected]> wrote:

well, technically it's for sure possible, it's just another of these
24h
things. Technically, it's a question of interface, and insofar of
which
types of modules. Obviously, these will be slower, and how slow is
another
interface/effort question.

Thinking about this, one could probably also claim the answer is
"yes,
you
can write OUTPUT modules in any language", it's just a doc issue. In
fact,
omprog can be used as an interface here. It's actually not even a bad
interface...

Again, something learned ;)


Probably the cheapest (implementation) "binding" for rsyslog would be
a system() like call.  Execute the subprogram with /bin/sh -c and
communicate with structured messages on STDIO.


a real module binding would be far more complex. It would allow the
module
(in whatever language) access to the rsyslog queues and other data
structures. This is possible, but not easy by any means.

One big problem is that currently rsyslog does all this work in a
threaded
environment. It may make sense in v9 or v10 to shift from a default
shared-everything threading model to a explicit shared memory
multiprocess
model. At that point having one of the processes use a different
language
would not be that hard.

But in the current threaded model, having one thread run a different
language would be very, very hard.

The other issue here is performance. Rsyslog goes to a LOT of effort to
be
fast. Some of the things that have made very noticable diffences in
performance in rsyslog are things that seem like they should be very
minor.
Think about these things and then think about what would be involved to
define interfaces in a multi-language safe way.

things that have resulted in noticable speedups have been:

removing gettimeofday() calls.

  it used to be that rsyslog recorded when a message arrived, when it
was
put on the main queue, when it was moved to an action queue, when it
was
pulled from the action queue, and when it was delivered

  now, high performance users configure rsyslog so that it only does
one
gettimeofday() call per hundred (ot thousand) messages that arrive and
use
that one time for every message

string modules

  it used to be that the default template (<%pri%>%timestamp%
%hostname%
%syslogtag%%msg%) was interpreted by the rsyslog engine for every
message
that was output

  now string modules written in C create these strings rather than
interpreting the template. This resulted in a double-digit %
performance
improvement

With optimizations like these in use, changing things to allow for a
module written in a different language to have access to the rsyslog
internals as would be needed for a high-performance interface seems
like
it
will probably end up hurting the rsyslog performance overall.


That being said, I am very much in favor of multi-process with explicit
sharing rather than multi-threaded with implicit sharing, but getting
all
the interfaces correct and fast would be a VERY hard task.

David Lang

_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a
myriad
of sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you
DON'T LIKE THAT.

_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a myriad
of sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you
DON'T LIKE THAT.

_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a myriad
of sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you
DON'T LIKE THAT.

_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a myriad of 
sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you DON'T LIKE 
THAT.

_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a myriad of 
sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you DON'T LIKE 
THAT.

Reply via email to