Zulip runs puppet manually, using the command-line tool; it does not
make use of the `puppet` service which, by default, attempts to
contact a host named `puppet` every two minutes to get a manifest to
apply. These attempts can generate log spam and user confusion.
Disable and stop the `puppet` service via puppet.
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.
Moving `/user_avatars/` to being served partially through Django
removes the need for the `no_serve_uploads` nginx reconfiguring when
switching between S3 and local backends. This is important because a
subsequent commit will move S3 attachments to being served through
nginx, which would make `no_serve_uploads` entirely nonsensical of a
name.
Serve the files through Django, with an offload for the actual image
response to an internal nginx route. In development, serve the files
directly in Django.
We do _not_ mark the contents as immutable for caching purposes, since
the path for avatar images is hashed only by their user-id and a salt,
and as such are reused when a user's avatar is updated.
The `django-sendfile2` module unfortunately only supports a single
`SENDFILE` root path -- an invariant which subsequent commits need to
break. Especially as Zulip only runs with a single webserver, and
thus sendfile backend, the functionality is simple to inline.
It is worth noting that the following headers from the initial Django
response are _preserved_, if present, and sent unmodified to the
client; all other headers are overridden by those supplied by the
internal redirect[^1]:
- Content-Type
- Content-Disposition
- Accept-Ranges
- Set-Cookie
- Cache-Control
- Expires
As such, we explicitly unset the Content-type header to allow nginx to
set it from the static file, but set Content-Disposition and
Cache-Control as we want them to be.
[^1]: https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/xsendfile/
As uploads are a feature of the application, not of a generic nginx
deployment, move them into the `zulip::app_frontend_base` class. This
is purely for organizational clarity -- we do not support deployments
with has `zulip::nginx` but not `zulip::app_frontend_base`.
‘exit’ is pulled in for the interactive interpreter as a side effect
of the site module; this can be disabled with python -S and shouldn’t
be relied on.
Also, use the NoReturn type where appropriate.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
Starting with wal-g 2.0.1, they provide `aarch64` assets[^1].
Effectively revert d7b59c86ce, and use
the pre-built binary for `aarch64` rather than spend a bunch of space
and time having to build it from source.
[^1]: https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g/releases/tag/v2.0.1
A number of autossh connections are already left open for
port-forwarding Munin ports; autossh starts the connections and
ensures that they are automatically restarted if they are severed.
However, this represents a missed opportunity. Nagios's monitoring
uses a large number of SSH connections to the remote hosts to run
commands on them; each of these connections requires doing a complete
SSH handshake and authentication, which can have non-trivial network
latency, particularly for hosts which may be located far away, in a
network topology sense (up to 1s for a no-op command!).
Use OpenSSH's ability to multiplex multiple connections over a single
socket, to reuse the already-established connection. We leave an
explicit `ControlMaster no` in the general configuration, and not
`auto`, as we do not wish any of the short-lived Nagios connections to
get promoted to being a control socket if the autossh is not running
for some reason.
We enable protocol-level keepalives, to give a better chance of the
socket being kept open.
These hosts were excluded from `zulipconf_nagios_hosts` in
8cff27f67d, because it was replicating the previously hard-coded
behaviour exactly. That behaviour was an accident of history, in that
4fbe201187 and before had simply not monitored hosts of this class.
There is no reason to not add SSH tunnels and munin monitoring for
these hosts; stop skipping them.
Since Django factors request.is_secure() into its CSRF check, we need
this to tell it to consider requests forwarded from nginx to Tornado
as secure.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
One should now be able to configure a regex by appending _regex to the
port number:
[tornado_sharding]
9802_regex = ^[l-p].*\.zulipchat\.com$
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
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>
Some legitimate requests in Zulip can take more than 20s to be
processed, and we don't have a current problem where having a 20s
limit here is preventing a problem.
The `needrestart` tool added in 22.04 is useful in terms of listing
which services may need to be restarted to pick up updated libraries.
However, it prompts about the current state of services needing
restart for *every* subsequent `apt-get upgrade`, and defaulting core
services to restarting requires carefully manually excluding them
every time, at risk of causing an unscheduled outage.
Build a list of default-off services based on the list in
unattended-upgrades.
The default value in uwsgi is 4k; receiving more than this amount from
nginx leads to a 502 response (though, happily, the backend uwsgi does not
terminate).
ab18dbfde5 originally increased it from the unstated uwsgi default
of 4096, to 8192; b1da797955 made it configurable, in order to allow
requests from clients with many cookies, without causing 502's[1].
nginx defaults to a limitation of 1k, with 4 additional 8k header
lines allowed[2]; any request larger than that returns a response of
`400 Request Header Or Cookie Too Large`. The largest header size
theoretically possible from nginx, by default, is thus 33k, though
that would require packing four separate headers to exactly 8k each.
Remove the gap between nginx's limit and uwsgi's, which could trigger
502s, by removing the uwsgi configurability, and setting a 64k size in
uwsgi (the max allowable), which is larger than nginx's default limit.
uWSGI's documentation of `buffer-size` ([3], [4]) also notes that "It
is a security measure too, so adapt to your app needs instead of
maxing it out." Python has no security issues with buffers of 64k,
and there is no appreciable memory footprint difference to having a
larger buffer available in uwsgi.
[1]: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/31-production-help/topic/works.20in.20Edge.20not.20Chrome/near/719523
[2]: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#client_header_buffer_size
[3]: https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ThingsToKnow.html
[4]: https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Options.html#buffer-size
Support for this header was removed in Chrome 78, Safari 15.4, and
Edge 17. It was never supported in Firefox.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
This check loads Django, and as such must be run as the zulip user.
Repeat the same pattern used elsewhere in nagios, of writing a state
file, which is read by `check_cron_file`.
Replication checks should only run on primary and replicas, not
standalone hosts; while `autovac_freeze` currently only runs on
primary hosts, it functions identically on replicas, and is fine to
run there.
Make `autovac_freeze` run on all `postgresql` hosts, and make
standalone hosts no longer `postgres_primary`, so they do not fail the
replication tests.
Alex Vandiver
Anders Kaseorg
Matt Keller