When file uploads are stored in S3, this means that Zulip serves as a
302 to S3. Because browsers do not cache redirects, this means that
no image contents can be cached -- and upon every page load or reload,
every recently-posted image must be re-fetched. This incurs extra
load on the Zulip server, as well as potentially excessive bandwidth
usage from S3, and on the client's connection.
Switch to fetching the content from S3 in nginx, and serving the
content from nginx. These have `Cache-control: private, immutable`
headers set on the response, allowing browsers to cache them locally.
Because nginx fetching from S3 can be slow, and requests for uploads
will generally be bunched around when a message containing them are
first posted, we instruct nginx to cache the contents locally. This
is safe because uploaded file contents are immutable; access control
is still mediated by Django. The nginx cache key is the URL without
query parameters, as those parameters include a time-limited signed
authentication parameter which lets nginx fetch the non-public file.
This adds a number of nginx-level configuration parameters to control
the caching which nginx performs, including the amount of in-memory
index for he cache, the maximum storage of the cache on disk, and how
long data is retained in the cache. The currently-chosen figures are
reasonable for small to medium deployments.
The most notable effect of this change is in allowing browsers to
cache uploaded image content; however, while there will be many fewer
requests, it also has an improvement on request latency. The
following tests were done with a non-AWS client in SFO, a server and
S3 storage in us-east-1, and with 100 requests after 10 requests of
warm-up (to fill the nginx cache). The mean and standard deviation
are shown.
| | Redirect to S3 | Caching proxy, hot | Caching proxy, cold |
| ----------------- | ------------------- | ------------------- | ------------------- |
| Time in Django | 263.0 ms ± 28.3 ms | 258.0 ms ± 12.3 ms | 258.0 ms ± 12.3 ms |
| Small file (842b) | 586.1 ms ± 21.1 ms | 266.1 ms ± 67.4 ms | 288.6 ms ± 17.7 ms |
| Large file (660k) | 959.6 ms ± 137.9 ms | 609.5 ms ± 13.0 ms | 648.1 ms ± 43.2 ms |
The hot-cache performance is faster for both large and small files,
since it saves the client the time having to make a second request to
a separate host. This performance improvement remains at least 100ms
even if the client is on the same coast as the server.
Cold nginx caches are only slightly slower than hot caches, because
VPC access to S3 endpoints is extremely fast (assuming it is in the
same region as the host), and nginx can pool connections to S3 and
reuse them.
However, all of the 648ms taken to serve a cold-cache large file is
occupied in nginx, as opposed to the only 263ms which was spent in
nginx when using redirects to S3. This means that to overall spend
less time responding to uploaded-file requests in nginx, clients will
need to find files in their local cache, and skip making an
uploaded-file request, at least 60% of the time. Modeling shows a
reduction in the number of client requests by about 70% - 80%.
The `Content-Disposition` header logic can now also be entirely shared
with the local-file codepath, as can the `url_only` path used by
mobile clients. While we could provide the direct-to-S3 temporary
signed URL to mobile clients, we choose to provide the
served-from-Zulip signed URL, to better control caching headers on it,
and greater consistency. In doing so, we adjust the salt used for the
URL; since these URLs are only valid for 60s, the effect of this salt
change is minimal.
https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_map_module.html
Since Puppet doesn’t manage the contents of nginx_sharding.conf after
its initial creation, it needs to be renamed so we can give it
different default contents.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
In production, the `wildcard-zulipchat.com.combined-chain.crt` file is
just a symlink to the snakeoil certificates; but we do not puppet that
symlink, which makes new hosts fail to start cleanly. Instead, point
explicitly to the snakeoil certificate, and explain why.
We should eventually add templating for the set of hosts here, but
it's worth merging this change to remove the deleted hostname and
replace it with the current one.
This allows straight-forward configuration of realm-based Tornado
sharding through simply editing /etc/zulip/zulip.conf to configure
shards and running scripts/refresh-sharding-and-restart.
Co-Author-By: Mateusz Mandera <mateusz.mandera@zulip.com>
We could anchor the regexes, but there’s no need for the power (and
responsibility) of regexes here.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulipchat.com>
Zulip has had a small use of WebSockets (specifically, for the code
path of sending messages, via the webapp only) since ~2013. We
originally added this use of WebSockets in the hope that the latency
benefits of doing so would allow us to avoid implementing a markdown
local echo; they were not. Further, HTTP/2 may have eliminated the
latency difference we hoped to exploit by using WebSockets in any
case.
While we’d originally imagined using WebSockets for other endpoints,
there was never a good justification for moving more components to the
WebSockets system.
This WebSockets code path had a lot of downsides/complexity,
including:
* The messy hack involving constructing an emulated request object to
hook into doing Django requests.
* The `message_senders` queue processor system, which increases RAM
needs and must be provisioned independently from the rest of the
server).
* A duplicate check_send_receive_time Nagios test specific to
WebSockets.
* The requirement for users to have their firewalls/NATs allow
WebSocket connections, and a setting to disable them for networks
where WebSockets don’t work.
* Dependencies on the SockJS family of libraries, which has at times
been poorly maintained, and periodically throws random JavaScript
exceptions in our production environments without a deep enough
traceback to effectively investigate.
* A total of about 1600 lines of our code related to the feature.
* Increased load on the Tornado system, especially around a Zulip
server restart, and especially for large installations like
zulipchat.com, resulting in extra delay before messages can be sent
again.
As detailed in
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/12862#issuecomment-536152397, it
appears that removing WebSockets moderately increases the time it
takes for the `send_message` API query to return from the server, but
does not significantly change the time between when a message is sent
and when it is received by clients. We don’t understand the reason
for that change (suggesting the possibility of a measurement error),
and even if it is a real change, we consider that potential small
latency regression to be acceptable.
If we later want WebSockets, we’ll likely want to just use Django
Channels.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulipchat.com>
This should be a nice performance improvement for browsers that
support it.
We can't yet enabled this in the Zulip on-premise nginx configuration,
because that still has to support Trusty.
As part of our effort to change the data model away from each user
having a single API key, we're eliminating the couple requests that
were made from Django to Tornado (as part of a /register or home
request) where we used the user's API key grabbed from the database
for authentication.
Instead, we use the (already existing) internal_notify_view
authentication mechanism, which uses the SHARED_SECRET setting for
security, for these requests, and just fetch the user object using
get_user_profile_by_id directly.
Tweaked by Yago to include the new /api/v1/events/internal endpoint in
the exempt_patterns list in test_helpers, since it's an endpoint we call
through Tornado. Also added a couple missing return type annotations.
Whatever dist/ functionality this had in 2014 is now served by
zulip.org, and since this serves as a sample, it should be as simple
as possible.
Previously, this was more cluttered than it needed to be.
The old "zulip_internal" name was from back when Zulip, Inc. had two
distributions of Zulip, the enterprise distribution in puppet/zulip/
and the "internal" SAAS distribution in puppet/zulip_internal. I
think the name is a bit confusing in the new fully open-source Zulip
work, so we're replacing it with "zulip_ops". I don't think the new
name is perfect, but it's better.
In the following commits, we'll delete a bunch of pieces of Zulip,
Inc.'s infrastructure that don't exist anymore and thus are no longer
useful (e.g. the old Trac configuration), with the goal of cleaning
the repository of as much unnecessary content as possible.
Alex Vandiver
Tim Abbott
Anders Kaseorg
Tim Abbott
Anders Kaseorg
Tim Abbott