zulip/scripts
Anders Kaseorg ea6934c26d dependencies: Remove WebSockets system for sending messages.
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>
2020-01-14 22:34:00 -08:00
..
lib dependencies: Remove WebSockets system for sending messages. 2020-01-14 22:34:00 -08:00
nagios dependencies: Remove WebSockets system for sending messages. 2020-01-14 22:34:00 -08:00
setup populate_db: Fix handling of memcached flushing. 2020-01-13 18:05:21 -08:00
README.md cleanup: Delete trailing newlines. 2019-08-06 23:29:11 -07:00
__init__.py Factor out venv-creating code from provision.py. 2016-06-21 11:25:41 -07:00
get-django-setting Remove `from __future__ import absolute_import`. 2017-10-17 22:59:42 -07:00
purge-old-deployments scripts: Clean up output from 'clean_unused_caches'. 2019-09-30 10:51:00 -07:00
restart-server dependencies: Remove WebSockets system for sending messages. 2020-01-14 22:34:00 -08:00
upgrade-zulip Use #!/usr/bin/env for bash shebangs. 2018-12-17 17:21:08 -08:00
upgrade-zulip-from-git Use #!/usr/bin/env for bash shebangs. 2018-12-17 17:21:08 -08:00
zulip-puppet-apply parse_lsb_release: Use /etc/os-release instead of /etc/lsb-release. 2019-08-28 17:53:27 -07:00

README.md

This directory contains scripts that:

  • Generally do not require access to Django or the database (those are "management commands"), and thus are suitable to run operationally.

  • Are useful for managing a production deployment of Zulip (many are also used in a Zulip development environment, though development-only scripts live in tools/).

For more details, see https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/directory-structure.html.