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 is a preparatory commit for using isort for sorting all of our
imports, merging changes to files where we can easily review the
changes as something we're happy with.
These are also files with relatively little active development, which
means we don't expect much merge conflict risk from these changes.
Previous cleanups (mostly the removals of Python __future__ imports)
were done in a way that introduced leading newlines. Delete leading
newlines from all files, except static/assets/zulip-emoji/NOTICE,
which is a verbatim copy of the Apache 2.0 license.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulipchat.com>
These are the exceptions to the rule that our queues correspond to
queue-processor workers.
Purging `notify_tornado` in particular is a useful workaround right
now for some error spew in the dev environment.
Before we were removing items individually from the queue. We now
directly use RabbitMQ's queue purging mechanism.
(imported from commit 62ab52c724c5a221b4c81a967154a4046a579f84)
This is useful in debugging when you just want to discard all the
messages in a queue because they have the wrong structure.
(imported from commit 8559ac74f11841430b4d0c801d5506ebcb74c3eb)
Alex Vandiver
Anders Kaseorg
Anders Kaseorg
Tim Abbott
Greg Price
rht
Rafid Aslam
Tim Abbott
Reid Barton
Tim Abbott
Zev Benjamin