Erlang: How does processes mailboxes relates to the scheduler run-queue? - process

I'm new to Erlang. As far as I know:
A VM has one or more (SMP mode) schedulers.
A scheduler has exactly one message run queue
Also:
A process has an 'internal' mail box, for incomming messages
Since a private mailbox seems to be local to a process, how does it relate to the 'global' scheduler run queue? Are they the same, e.g. is a mail box a small subset of the scheduler run queue? If not, how do they relate to each other?
Thanks

A process has a message queue. A scheduler has process run queues, not message run queues. Schedulers run processes, and a process receives messages from its message queue.

Related

Coordinate scheduled jobs between multiple producers

I have a distributed system of producers and consumers across several servers, with redundant nodes—both for failover and load-balancing. The nodes communicate via RabbitMQ messages.
Each producer runs its own scheduler to invoke jobs, which one of the consumers should run. This works by publishing the appropriate RabbitMQ message, that one of the consumers will process.
Now, the tricky part is, each job should be run only once. In short, my requirements are:
Only one invoke message per scheduled job should be processed (by any of the consumer instances)
If any of the procuders goes down, the job should still be invoked by the other instances
I can't figure out how to implement this without relying on anything else but RabbitMQ. I could make it work if there was such a thing as an "exclusive exchange", which only one producer can connect to at a time. I thought about making the consumers ignore any duplicate invokes for the same job, but this will not work, because due to the load-balancing, subsequent messages may be received by any of the other instances. Another idea was implementing a mechanism to declare one of the producers the "principal" node, so only this one is allowed to send invokes, but this basically presented the same problem of coordinating between instances.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Is it possible to define priorities for Celery workers consuming from the same queue?

I have two machines on my network running Celery workers that process tasks from a common queue (the messaging back-end is RabbitMQ).
One machine is much more powerful and processes the tasks faster (which is important). If there is only one task in the queue, I always want it to run on this machine. If the queue is full, I want the less powerful machine to start accepting tasks as well.
Is there a recommended, elegant way to do this? Or do I have to set up two queues ("fast" and "slow") and implement some kind of router that sends tasks to the "slow" queue only when the "fast" queue is full?

celery multiple workers but one queue

i am new to celery and redis.
I started up my redis server by using redis-server.
Celery was run using this parameter
celery -A proj worker
There are no other configurations. However, i realised that when i have a long running job in celery, it does not process another task that is in the queue until the long running task is completed. My understanding is that since i have 8 cores on my CPU, i should be able to process 8 tasks concurrently since the default parameter for -c is the number of cores?
Am i missing something here ?
Your problem is classical, everybode met this who had long-running tasks.
The root cause is that celery tries to optimize your execution flow reserving some tasks for each worker. But if one of these tasks is long-running the others get locked. It is known as 'prefetch count'. This is because by default celery set up for short tasks.
Another related setting is a 'late ack'. By default worker takes a task from the queue and immediately sends an 'acknowledge' signal, then broker removes this task from the queue. But this means that more messages will be prefetched for this worker. 'late ack' enabled tells worker to send acknowledge only after the task is completed.
This is just in two words. You may read more about prefetch and late ack.
As for the solution - just use these settings (celery 4.x):
task_acks_late = True
worker_prefetch_multiplier = 1
or for previous versions (2.x - 3.x):
CELERY_ACKS_LATE = True
CELERYD_PREFETCH_MULTIPLIER = 1
Also, starting the worker with parameter -Ofair does the same.

celeryev Queue in RabbitMQ Becomes Very Large

I am using celery on rabbitmq. I have been sending thousands of messages to the queue and they are being processed successfully and everything is working just fine. However, the number of messages in several rabbitmq queues are growing quite large (hundreds of thousands of items in the queue). The queues are named celeryev.[...] (see screenshot below). Is this appropriate behavior? What is the purpose of these queues and shouldn't they be regularly purged? Is there a way to purge them more regularly, I think they are taking up quite a bit of disk space.
You can use the CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_TTL celery option (only working with amqp), that will set the message expiry time, after which it will be deleted from the queue.
For anyone else who is running into problems with a celeryev queue becoming very large and threatening the disk space on your rabbitmq server, beware the accepted answer! Here's my suggestion. Just issue this command on your rabbitmq instance:
rabbitmqctl set_policy limit_celeryev_queues "^celeryev\." '{"max-length":1000000}' --apply-to queues
This will limit any queue beginning with "celeryev" to 1 Million entries. I did some experimenting with a stuck flower instance causing a runaway celeryev queue, and setting CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_TTL / CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_EXPIRES did not help control the queue size.
In my testing, I started a flower process, then SIGSTOP'ed it, and watched its celeryev queue start running away. Neither of these two settings helped at all. I confirmed SIGCONT'ing the flower process would bring the queue back to 0 rapidly. I am not certain why these two knobs didn't help, but it may have something to do with how RabbitMQ implements these two settings.
First, the Per-Message TTL corresponding to CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_TTL only establishes an expiration time on each queue entry -- AIUI it will not automatically delete the message out of the queue to save space upon expiration. Second, the Queue TTL corresponding to CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_EXPIRES says that it "... guarantees that the queue will be deleted, if unused for at least the expiration period". However, I believe that their definition of "unused" may be too strict to kick in for e.g. an overburdened, stuck, or killed flower process.
EDIT: Unfortunately, one problem with this suggestion is that the set_policy ... apply-to queues will only impact existing queues, and flower can and will create new queues which may overflow.
Celery use celeryev prefixed queues (and exchange) for monitoring, you can configure it as you want or disable at all (celery control disable_events).
You just have to set a config to your Celery.
If you want to avoid Celery from creating celeryev.* queues:
CELERY_SEND_EVENTS = False # Will not create celeryev.* queues
If you need these queues for monitoring purpose (CeleryFlower for instance), you may regularly purge them:
CELERY_EVENT_QUEUE_EXPIRES = 60 # Will delete all celeryev. queues without consumers after 1 minute.
The solution came from here: https://www.cloudamqp.com/docs/celery.html
You can limit the queue size in RabbitMQ with x-max-length queue declaration argument
http://www.rabbitmq.com/maxlength.html

Simple queue with Celery and RabbitMQ

I'm trying to implement a simple queue that performs one task at a time. Offloading tasks off the main thread using Celery and setting concurrency=1 in the Celery config works fine, but I might want to use more concurrent workers for other tasks.
Is there a way to tell Celery or RabbitMQ to not use multiple concurrent workers for a task (except by forcing concurrency=1)? I can't find anything in the documentation but maybe these tools are not designed for a linear queue?
Thanks!
I think what you need is a separate queue for each type of task. Create separate workers that consume from each queue, with concurrency set to 1.