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Haxe Haxe Log

My Haxe Log: Week #2

This week:

  • My token one day a week I continued on my Node-Webkit project.  This time I made externs for Kue (externs, which appear to be working) and FFMpeg (externs, not functional just yet).  Still enjoying working with Node-Webkit, and with the Node-API library especially.  Sad I didn’t get to make more progress on it this week.
  •  Ufront:
      • Make tracing / logging work reliably between multiple requests. After enabling neko.Web.cacheModule(), I began to find areas where Ufront was not very multiple-request-friendly. These would have surfaced later with a port to Client JS or Node JS, but it’s good to find them now.One problem was that our tracing and logging modules were behaving as if there was only one request at a time. This could result in a trace message for one request ending up being output to somebody else’s request, which is obviously bad.

        The problem is a tricky one, as trace() always translates to haxe.Log.trace(), and you with Ufront’s multiple-request-at-a-time design, you can’t know which request is the current one from a static method. If I think of a clever way to do it, possibly involving cookies and sessions, then I might include a HttpContext.getCurrentContext() static method. This would probably have to be implemented separately for each supported platform.

        The solution for now, however, was to not keep track of log messages in the TraceModule, but in the HttpContext. Then on the onLogRequest event, the trace modules get access to the log messages for the current context, and can output them to the browser, to a file, or whichever they choose.

        The downside is that you have to use httpContext.ufTrace() rather than trace(). I added a shortcut for this in both ufront.web.Controller and ufront.remoting.RemotingApiClass, so that in your controllers or APIs you can call uftrace() and it will be associated with the current request. There is also ufLog, ufWarn and ufError.

        I also made RemotingModule work similarly with tracing and logging – so logs go to both the log file and the remoting call to the browser.

      • Fix logging in ErrorModule. One of the things that made debugging the new ufront really hard was that when there was an Error, the ErrorModule displayed, but the trace messages did not get sent to the browser or the log file. I did a bit of code cleanup and got this working now.
      • Fixed File Sessions / EasyAuth. Once able to get my traces and logs working more consistently, I was able to debug and fix the remaining issues in FileSession, so now EasyAuth is working reliably, which is great.
      • Added Login / Logout for UF-Admin. With UF-Admin, I added a login screen and logout, that works with EasyAuth for now. I guess I will make it pluggable later… For now though it means you can set up a simple website, not worry about auth for the front end, but have the backend password protected. If you use EasyAuth for your website / app, the same session will work on the ufadmin page.
      • Created uf-content for app-generated files. I moved all app-generated files (sessions, logs, temp files etc) into a folder called “uf-content”. Then I made this configurable, and relative to httpContext.request.scriptDirectory. You can configure it by changing the contentDirectory option in your UfrontConfiguration. This will make it easier when deploying, we can have instructions to make that single directory writeable but not accessible via the web, and then everything that requires FileSystem access can work reliably from there.
      • Pushed new versions of the libraries. Now that the basics are working, I pushed new versions of the libraries to Haxelib. They are marked as ufront-* with version 1.0.0-beta.1. From here it will be easy to update them individually and move towards a final release.
      • Demo Blog App. To demonstrate the basics of how it works, and a kind of “best practices” for project structure, I created a demo app, and thought I would start with a blog. I started, and the basic setup is there, including the config structure and each of the controller actions, and the “ufadmin” integration. But it’s not working just yet, needs more work.
      • Identified Hair website. I have a website for a friend’s small business that I’ve been procrastinating working on for a long time. On Saturday I finally got started on it, and set up the basic project and routes in Ufront. In about 4 hours I managed to get the project set up, all the controllers / routes working, all the content in place and a basic responsive design with CSS positioning working. All the data is either HTML, Markdown or Database Models (which get inserted into views). Once I’ve got their branding/graphics included, I’ll use ufront to provide a basic way to change data in their database. And then if they’re lucky, I might look at doing some Facebook integration to show their photo galleries on the site.
Categories
Haxe

neko.Web.cacheModule()

Until now I haven’t had to worry much about the speed of sites made using Haxe / Ufront,  – none of the sites or apps I’ve made have anywhere near the volume for it to be a problem, and the general performance was fast enough that no one asked questions. But I’m going to soon be a part of building the new Haxe website, which will have significant volume.

So I ran some benchmarks using ab (Apache’s benchmarking tool), and wasn’t initially happy with the results. They were okay, but not significantly faster than your average PHP framework. Maybe I would have to look at mod_tora or NodeJS for deployment.

Then I remembered something: a single line of code you can add that vastly increases the speed: neko.Web.cacheModule(main).

Benchmarks

Here is some super dumb sample code:

class Server {
  static var staticInt = 0;
  static function main() {
    #if neko
      neko.Web.cacheModule(main); // comment out to test the difference
    #end 
    var localInt = 0; 
    trace ( ++staticInt ); 
    trace ( ++localInt ); 
  } 
} 

And I am testing with this command:

ab -n 1000 -c 20 http://localhost/ 

Here are my results (in requests/second on my laptop):

  • Apache/mod_php (no cache): 161.89
  • NekoTools server: 687.49
  • Apache/mod_neko (no cache): 1054.70
  • Apache/mod_tora (no cache): 745.94
  • Apache/mod_neko (cacheModule): 3516.04
  • Apache/mod_tora (cacheModule): 2185.30

First up: I assume mod_tora has advantages on sites that use more memory, but a dummy sample like this is more overhead than it’s worth.

Second, and related: I know these tests are almost worthless, we really need to be testing a real app, with file access and template processing and database calls.

Let’s do that, same command, same benchmark parameters:

  • Apache/mod_php (no cache): 3.6 (ouch!)
  • NekoTools server: 20.11
  • Apache/mod_neko (no cache): 48.74
  • Apache/mod_tora (no cache): 33.29
  • Apache/mod_neko (cacheModule): 351.42
  • Apache/mod_tora (cacheModule): 402.76

(Note: PHP has similar caching, using modules like PHP-APC. I’m not experienced setting these up however, and am happy with the neko performances I’m seeing so I won’t investigate further)

Conclusions:

  • the biggest speed up (in my case) seems to come from cacheModule(), not mod_tora. I believe once memory usage increases significantly, tora brings advantages in that arena, and so will be faster due to less garbage collection.
  • this could be made faster, my app currently has very little optimisation:
    • the template system uses Xml, which I assume isn’t very fast.
    • a database connection is required for every request
    • there is no caching (memcached, redis etc)
    • I think I have some terribly ineffecient database queries that I’m sure I could optimise
  • Ufront targeting Haxe/PHP is not very fast out-of-the-box. I’m sure you could optimise it, but it’s not there yet.
  • This is running on my laptop, not a fast server. Then again, my laptop may be faster than a low end server, not sure.

Usage

So, how does it work?

#if neko neko.Web.cacheModule( main ); #end 

The conditional compilation (#if neko and #end) is just there so that you can still compile to other targets without getting errors. The cacheModule function has the following documentation:

Set the main entry point function used to handle requests.
Setting it back to null will disable code caching.

By entry point, it is usually going to mean the main() function that is called when your code first runs. So when the docs ask for a function to use as the entry point, I just use main, meaning, the static function main() that I am currently in.

I’m unsure of the impact of having multiple “.n” files or a different entry point.

The cache is reset whenever the file timestamp changes: so when you re-compile, or when you load a new “.n” file in place.

If you wanted to manually disable the cache for some reason, you use cacheModule(null). I’m not sure what the use case is for this though… why disable the cache?

Gotchas (Static variable traps with cacheModule)

The biggest gotcha is that static variables persist in your module. They are initialized just once, which is a big part of the speed increase. Let’s look at the example code I posted before:

class Server {
  static var staticInt = 0;
  static function main() {
    #if neko
      neko.Web.cacheModule(main); // comment out to test the difference
    #end 
    var localInt = 0; 
    trace ( ++staticInt ); 
    trace ( ++localInt ); 
  } 
} 

With caching disabled, both trace statements will print “0” every time. With caching enabled, the staticInt variable does not get reset – it initializes at 0, and then every single page load will continue to increment it, it will go up and up and up.

What does this mean practically:

  • If you want to cache stuff, put it in a static variable. For example:
    • Database connections: store them in a static variable and the connection will persist.
    • Templates: read from disk once, store them in a static variable
    • App Config, especially if you’re passing JSON or Xml, put it in a static and it stays cached.
  • Things which should be unique to a request, don’t store in a static variable. For example:
    • Ufront has a class called NekoSession, which was entirely static methods and variables, and made assumptions that the statics would be reset between requests. Wrong! Having the session cached between different requests (by different users) was a disaster – everytime you click a link you would find yourself logged in as a different user. Needless to say we needed to refactor this and not use statics :) To approach it differently, you could use a static var sessions:StringMap<SessionID, SessionData> and actually have it work appropriately as long as the cache stayed alive.
    • Avoid singletons like Server.currentUser, or even User.current – these static variables are most likely going to be cached between requests leading to unusual results.