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This is a lab to explore various clustering solutions, mostly key/value stores. To do something interesting we implement throttling.

Please note that this is not intended as a production grade throttling library. The primary purpose is to explore and give an understanding of clustered state. Therefore, the design and implementation mostly favours simplicity before anything else.

Get started

To get started with a throttling implementation using spymemcached with an embedded jmemcached:

git clone https://github.com/jankronquist/throttling-lab.git
cd throttling-lab
mvn package
java -jar target/throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar com.jayway.throttling.impl.memcached.Memcached
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/accounts/smallCustomer/demo

(Make sure you have Java 7 and Maven 3 installed)

Problem description

When you publish an API you sometimes need to limit the number of calls each customer can make to either reduce the load on your servers or because each call actually involves some cost to you. In this lab we use a simple algorithm: Within a time interval each customer (account) gets a number of credits. Each call consumes credits (possibly different amount per request). When all credits have been consumed no more calls are allowed within the time interval.

Your job is to implement this throttling mechanism by implementing this interface:

public interface ThrottlingService {
	boolean allow(String account, long cost, Callable<Interval> newInterval);
}

public class Interval {
	public final int seconds;
	public final long credits;

	public Interval(int seconds, long credits) {
		this.seconds = seconds;
		this.credits = credits;
	}
}

You need to consider the following things:

  • Web server load balancing - Multiple web servers should be able to use the same data
  • Failover - What happens when a server holding the data crashes? Do we replicate?
  • Scalability - We should be able to handle both many customers and many simultaneous requests

The lab has the following steps:

  • Implement a solution given a key/value store
  • Deploy on Amazon
  • Test (load, failover)

To get you started we have provided an implementation using memcached, see below. Notice that you can use Amazon ElastiCache or in fact any implementation supporting the protocol!

Suggested key/value stores to investigate:

You could also investigate third party services such as:

Other suggestions are welcome!

Memcached implementation

The memcached implementation uses a cached value that is decreased using decr until it reaches 0, then throttles all requests until the value is expired from the cache. Since standard memcached does not support sharding the clients have to shard the data. This must be done consistently, ie all clients must store a specific key at a certain server. To solve this spymemcached implements the Ketama consistent hashing algorithm.

To get you started without having to install anything, an embedded jmemcached daemon is started if you don't specify any external servers.

Command line arguments:

  • -Djmemcached.enabled - controls if jmemcached should be used or not (enabled by default if no servers specified)
  • -Djmemcached.port - port number to use for embedded jmemcached (default 11222, to avoid collision with install server)
  • -Djmemcached.maximumCapacity - number of objects to keep in the cache (default 1000)
  • -Dmemcached.servers - commaseparated list of server:port or nothing to use the embedded jmemcached

For example connecting to 2 external memcached servers:

java -jar target/throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar -Dmemcached.servers="someserver.com:11211,another.com:11211" com.jayway.throttling.impl.memcached.Memcached

Things to investigate:

  • What happens when a memcached server goes down? When it comes back up?
  • ...

HTTP API

The HTTP API has been greatly simplified and is only intended for testing and not how to actually use a ThrottlingService in a real application:

  • No authentication or other security have been implemented
  • No actual business logic have been implemented

To allow us to focus on the implementation and performance of the ThrottlingService the API exposes only the ThrottlingService itself. The following resources exists:

  • /accounts/:account/demo a single call with cost=1, intervalInSeconds=60 and creditsPerInterval=10. This is a demo of how it could look like in a real application. Still, no actual business logic is performed.
  • /single which performs a single call to allow with configurable cost, intervalInSeconds and creditsPerInterval. This is useful to perform tests with a single account and specific settings.
  • /multi which performs a number of calls to random accounts. This is useful if you want to test load, and only focus on the throttling implementation and not the HTTP call and its latency. The accounts used are "a" followed by a number, for example "a17". Use the accounts parameter to specify how many accounts you want to randomize between.

The arguments should be self explanatory using these curls:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/accounts/smallCustomer/demo
curl -X POST -d "account=smallCustomer" -d "cost=1" -d "intervalInSeconds=60" -d "creditsPerInterval=5" http://localhost:8080/single
curl -X POST -d "accounts=100" -d "calls=100" -d "cost=1" -d "intervalInSeconds=60" -d "creditsPerInterval=10" http://localhost:8080/multi

Notice how you can specify the length and credits of the interval. The reason for doing to is that is makes configuring the application really simple. In fact, no configuration is required and everything can be controlled from your test case! Obviously, this is not how you would configure a real application!

However, these values are only used when starting a new interval. For example trying to change the creditsPerInterval will not take effect until the first interval has timed out:

curl -X POST -d "account=smallCustomer" -d "cost=1" -d "intervalInSeconds=60" -d "creditsPerInterval=1" http://localhost:8080/single
; OK

curl -X POST -d "account=smallCustomer" -d "cost=1" -d "intervalInSeconds=60" -d "creditsPerInterval=1" http://localhost:8080/single
; THROTTLED

curl -X POST -d "account=smallCustomer" -d "cost=1" -d "intervalInSeconds=60" -d "creditsPerInterval=10" http://localhost:8080/single
; still THROTTLED

The return value of /multi is a JSON like {"calls": 100, "time": 55, "throttled": 3}. This is informational only and can be useful to verify that your test results are making sense. time is the time in milliseconds it took to perform all ThrottlingService calls. throttled is how many of those that were throttled.

The lab

Implementing a ThrottlingService

Create one class that implements ThrottlingService and another that implements ThrottlingContext which is used to initialize and configure your implementation.

Make sure your implementation works locally!

Deploy on Amazon

Launching an instance:

  1. Login, select EC2 instances and make sure to select an appropriate region
  2. Launch an instance, "Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS"
  3. Select instance type
  4. No "Advanced Instance Options"
  5. No "Storage Device Configuration"
  6. Specify instance name
  7. Create a new keypair (or use an existing if you have one!)
  8. Use an existing security group with SSH access ("Lab")
  9. Launch!

If you created a new keypair:

  1. Move the pem file to ~/.ssh/lab.pem
  2. chmod 600 ~/.ssh/lab.pem

Connecting to your instance:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/lab.pem ubuntu@<hostname>

Preparing the instance:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless

Build, deploy and run:

mvn package
scp -i ~/.ssh/lab.pem target/throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar ubuntu@<hostname>:
ssh -i ~/.ssh/lab.pem ubuntu@<hostname> "java -jar throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar com.jayway.throttling.impl.memcached.Memcached"

You are of course free to create scripts, change pom.xml to handle automatic deployment, use ssh config or whatever you feel is convenient for you.

Running JMeter

Generating load using JMeter is easy. However, it may be useful to run the tests on the same local network as your server is running on, to avoid introducing latency. The following process can both be run locally and on a separate Amazon EC2 instance. It generates load by calling multi as specified above.

Download and unzip JMeter to $JMETER_HOME. cd jmeter in the root of this project. Run load test using the following command:

$JMETER_HOME/bin/jmeter -n -l results.jtl -t load.jmx -p jmeter.properties

This does the following:

  • -n means non-gui
  • -l results.jtl means write result to results.jtl (this can later be loaded and visualized using JMeter UI)
  • -t load.jmx means run the tests specified in the file load.jmx
  • -p jmeter.properties configures jmeter using the provided properties (simply to enable summaries on the command line)

The following parameters can be used to configure the load.

  • -Dhost=localhost is the hostname for the web server
  • -Dport=8080 is the port for the web server
  • -Dthreads=40 is the number of threads jmeter will use
  • -DloopCount=1000 is the number of calls to multi each thread will perform
  • -DcallsPerMulti=100 is the number of calls to the ThrottlingService that will be done per request
  • -Daccounts=1000 is the number of random accounts used for calling multi.
  • -DintervalInSeconds=60 is the TTL for a counter
  • -DcreditsPerInterval=100 is the number of credits an account have during an interval
  • -Dcost=1 is the cost of a call

Notice that the total number of calls to ThrottlingService is threads * loopCount * callsPerMulti, that is 4.000.000 calls with the default settings. My developer machine handles around 30-40.000 calls per second, which means 300-400 requests to multi with the default 100 calls each.

Failover test

Since the default memcached implementation has an embedded jmemcached we can easily set up a cluster that shares data:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/lab.pem ubuntu@<server1> "java -jar throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar -Dmemcached.servers="server1.com:11211,server2:11211" -Djmemcached.enabled=true com.jayway.throttling.impl.memcached.Memcached"
ssh -i ~/.ssh/lab.pem ubuntu@<server2> "java -jar throttling-1.0-SNAPSHOT.one-jar.jar -Dmemcached.servers="server1.com:11211,server2:11211" -Djmemcached.enabled=true com.jayway.throttling.impl.memcached.Memcached"

Now you can create some accounts and set the value of the counter, for example by initializing it very low and make sure it has been throttled. Kill one of the webservers. Make some calls and see if every account is still throttled. What is going on?

You can also perform a similar test while creating load using jmeter. What happens when you shut down one of the webservers? Make sure your load is generated to other one!

Perform similar investigations for your own implementation, ie without the embedded jmemcached.