Redis Functionality - redis

I am trying to use redis for a simple process.
Process :-
Read value for a key and update it.
Example :- (a,1)
Read a value and update 1 to 2.
The problem here is that in multithreaded environment ,multiple thread (say 4) read at same time and then update it to 2, actually it should have been 4 .Is there a way where in I can impose locking in redis such that if one thread reads a value it imposes a lock so that other threads are kept in waiting state?

Use INCRBY to do an atomic increment:
redis> SET mykey "10"
"OK"
redis> INCRBY mykey 5
(integer) 15
redis>
Or, if you need something more sophisticated, use an uninterruptible MULTI command.

you do not need the lock. In multithreaded environment, suppose 4, they send
read and update commands to Redis not in right order.
may be:
1:read->2:read->1:update->2:update->3:read->3:update->4:read->4:update
you need combine 1:read and 1:update to an atomic operation, that is Lua Script.
you can write a Lua script for all operation and execute it whit EVAL command, the multithreaded commands will in right order.

Related

Define start number for redis INCR

I want to increment a redis counter but I want to start counting not from zero but from a defined starting number (for example -5).
I know how this can be achieved via SET/INCR inside a Lua script but I was wondering if I can achieve it only with INCR command. Something similar we define for INCRBY where the increment is defined, can we define the starting point?
Lua is perfectly fine for this procedure, but you can also do it with a transaction:
MULTI
SET counter -5 NX
INCR counter
EXEC
The INCR will run every time, so if you want your first call to set it to -5 you should change the SET value to -6. You can also pipe those 4 commands to avoid the 4 RTTs of sending the commands.
You can't do it with the INCR command alone. I would inspect the value of SETNX and if it returns 0 (meaning the key existed), then increment it.
Notice that if you are talking about non expiring counters, you can achieve atomicity this way without Lua, at the price of two roundtrips: If the key did not exist, we create it, set it to the initial value and that's it, one roundtrip, atomic. If it did exist, we increment it, but we are still consistent (unless the key expired or was deleted between the two calls).
However, there is no reason not to use a Lua script for this, it's the preferred way to do this stuff.

What Redis data type fit the most for following example

I have following scenario:
Fetch array of numbers (from REDIS) conditionally
For each number do some async stuff (fetch something from DB based on number)
For each thing in result set from DB do another async stuff
Periodically repeat 1. 2. 3. because new numbers will be constantly added to REDIS structure.Those numbers represent unix timestamp in milliseconds so out of the box those numbers will always be sorted in time of addition
Conditionally means fetch those unix timestamp from REDIS that are less or equal to current unix timestamp in milliseconds(Date.now())
Question is what REDIS data type fit the most for this use case having in mind that this code will be scaled up to N instances, so N instances will share access to single REDIS instance. To equally share the load each instance will read for example first(oldest) 5 numbers from REDIS. Numbers are unique (adding same number should fail silently) so REDIS SET seems like a good choice but reading M first elements from REDIS set seems impossible.
To prevent two different instance of the code to read same numbers REDIS read operation should be atomic, it should read the numbers and delete them. If any async operation fail on specific number (steps 2. and 3.), numbers should be added again to REDIS to be handled again. They should be re-added back to the head not to the end to be handled again as soon as possible. As far as i know SADD would push it to the tail.
SMEMBERS key would read everything, it looks like a hammer to me. I would need to include some application logic to get first five than to check what is less or equal to Date.now() and then to delete those and to wrap somehow everything in single transaction. Besides that set cardinality can be huge.
SSCAN sounds interesting but i don't have any clue how it works in "scaled" environment like described above. Besides that, per REDIS docs: The SCAN family of commands only offer limited guarantees about the returned elements since the collection that we incrementally iterate can change during the iteration process. Like described above collection will be changed frequently
A more appropriate data structure would be the Sorted Set - members have a float score that is very suitable for storing a timestamp and you can perform range searches (i.e. anything less or equal a given value).
The relevant starting points are the ZADD, ZRANGEBYSCORE and ZREMRANGEBYSCORE commands.
To ensure the atomicity when reading and removing members, you can choose between the the following options: Redis transactions, Redis Lua script and in the next version (v4) a Redis module.
Transactions
Using transactions simply means doing the following code running on your instances:
MULTI
ZRANGEBYSCORE <keyname> -inf <now-timestamp>
ZREMRANGEBYSCORE <keyname> -inf <now-timestamp>
EXEC
Where <keyname> is your key's name and <now-timestamp> is the current time.
Lua script
A Lua script can be cached and runs embedded in the server, so in some cases it is a preferable approach. It is definitely the best approach for short snippets of atomic logic if you need flow control (remember that a MULTI transaction returns the values only after execution). Such a script would look as follows:
local r = redis.call('ZRANGEBYSCORE', KEYS[1], '-inf', ARGV[1])
redis.call('ZREMRANGEBYSCORE', KEYS[1], '-inf', ARGV[1])
return r
To run this, first cache it using SCRIPT LOAD and then call it with EVALSHA like so:
EVALSHA <script-sha> 1 <key-name> <now-timestamp>
Where <script-sha> is the sha1 of the script returned by SCRIPT LOAD.
Redis modules
In the near future, once v4 is GA you'll be able to write and use modules. Once this becomes a reality, you'll be able to use this module we've made that provides the ZPOP command and could be extended to cover this use case as well.

set expiry for Hashmap values in Redis?

How do I set expiry for hashmaps in Redis like I do for regular values using SETX.
I want to provide TTL for a session for which I am storing a hasmap.
Can I create a Hashmap using SETEX itself ?
No, you can't create hash with SETEX (which is a strings methods). You can call EXPIRE on hash key, but that will expire the whole hash. There's no support at the moment for expiration of individual hash key/value pairs.
Update:
If you wanted to set expiration on the whole hash while setting its individual elements, you can achieve that in several ways.
Use pipelining. Pipelining is a special mode of operation where redis client issues several commands in quick succession, not waiting for a reply to send next one. Here's an example in ruby:
redis.pipelined do
redis.hset "foo", "bar", 1
redis.expire "foo", 300
end
Use transactions. Without watched keys this is similar to pipelining (for a transaction can't abort). The commands are guaranteed to run together and atomically (several pipelines can run interleaved, transactions are serialized)
redis.multi do
redis.hset "foo", "bar", 1
redis.expire "foo", 300
end
Use lua scripting to implement your custom HSETEX command. It will be executed atomically and you just have to send one command (instead of 2(pipelining) or 4 (transaction)).

Redis value update

Im currently having a redis data set with key representing ids and values as a json . I need to add a new entity in the json for every userid(keys). Is there any existing opensource tool? what is the way i should proceed to update for 1M keys of data.
There are a few possibilities:
Here's some pseudo code for doing this with Redis 2.6 Lua scripting.
for userid in users:
EVAL 'local obj = cjson.decode(redis.call("GET", KEY[1])); obj.subobj.newjsonkey = ARGV[1]; redis.call("SET", KEY[1], cjson.encode(obj));' 1 userid "new value!"
Short of that, you may need to stop the service and do this with GETs and SETs since you probably don't have a locking mechanism in place. If you can enforce a lock, see http://redis.io/commands/setnx
There are a few tools for updating an rdb. https://github.com/sripathikrishnan/redis-rdb-tools https://github.com/nrk/redis-rdb
Note, this answer was adapted to my answer to: Working with nested objects in Redis?

Autoincrement in Redis

I'm starting to use Redis, and I've run into the following problem.
I have a bunch of objects, let's say Messages in my system. Each time a new User connects, I do the following:
INCR some global variable, let's say g_message_id, and save INCR's return value (the current value of g_message_id).
LPUSH the new message (including the id and the actual message) into a list.
Other clients use the value of g_message_id to check if there are any new messages to get.
Problem is, one client could INCR the g_message_id, but not have time to LPUSH the message before another client tries to read it, assuming that there is a new message.
In other words, I'm looking for a way to do the equivalent of adding rows in SQL, and having an auto-incremented index to work with.
Notes:
I can't use the list indexes, since I often have to delete parts of the list, making it invalid.
My situation in reality is a bit more complex, this is a simpler version.
Current solution:
The best solution I've come up with and what I plan to do is use WATCH and Transactions to try and perform an "autoincrement" myself.
But this is such a common use-case in Redis that I'm surprised there is not existing answer for it, so I'm worried I'm doing something wrong.
If I'm reading correctly, you are using g_message_id both as an id sequence and as a flag to indicate new message(s) are available. One option is to split this into two variables: one to assign message identifiers and the other as a flag to signal to clients that a new message is available.
Clients can then compare the current / prior value of g_new_message_flag to know when new messages are available:
> INCR g_message_id
(integer) 123
# construct the message with id=123 in code
> MULTI
OK
> INCR g_new_message_flag
QUEUED
> LPUSH g_msg_queue "{\"id\": 123, \"msg\": \"hey\"}"
QUEUED
> EXEC
Possible alternative, if your clients can support it: you might want to look into the
Redis publish/subscribe commands, e.g. cients could publish notifications of new messages and subscribe to one or more message channels to receive notifications. You could keep the g_msg_queue to maintain a backlog of N messages for new clients, if necessary.
Update based on comment: If you want each client to detect there are available messages, pop all that are available, and zero out the list, one option is to use a transaction to read the list:
# assuming the message queue contains "123", "456", "789"..
# a client detects there are new messages, then runs this:
> WATCH g_msg_queue
OK
> LRANGE g_msg_queue 0 100000
QUEUED
> DEL g_msg_queue
QUEUED
> EXEC
1) 1) "789"
2) "456"
3) "123"
2) (integer) 1
Update 2: Given the new information, here's what I would do:
Have your writer clients use RPUSH to append new messages to the list. This lets the reader clients start at 0 and iterate forward over the list to get new messages.
Readers need to only remember the index of the last message they fetched from the list.
Readers watch g_new_message_flag to know when to fetch from the list.
Each reader client will then use "LRANGE list index limit" to fetch the new messages. Suppose a reader client has seen a total of 5 messages, it would run "LRANGE g_msg_queue 5 15" to get the next 10 messages. Suppose 3 are returned, so it remembers the index 8. You can make the limit as large as you want, and can walk through the list in small batches.
The reaper client should set a WATCH on the list and delete it inside a transaction, aborting if any client is concurrently reading from it.
When a reader client tries LRANGE and gets 0 messages it can assume the list has been truncated and reset its index to 0.
Do you really need unique sequential IDs? You can use UUIDs for uniqueness and timestamps to check for new messages. If you keep the clocks on all your servers properly synchronized then timestamps with a one second resolution should work just fine.
If you really do need unique sequential IDs then you'll probably have to set up a Flickr style ticket server to properly manage the central list of IDs. This would, essentially, move your g_message_id into a database with proper transaction handling.
You can simulate auto-incrementing a unique key for new rows. Simply use DBSIZE to get the current number of rows, then in your code, increment that number by 1, and use that number as the key for the new row. It's simple and atomic.