[PATCH] Improve performance when starting nginx with a lot of locations
Maxim Dounin
mdounin at mdounin.ru
Tue Oct 10 22:56:13 UTC 2023
Hello!
On Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 10:51:26AM +0900, Yusuke Nojima wrote:
> Thank you for your comment!
>
> > Could you please provide some more details about the use case,
> > such as how locations are used, and what is the approximate number
> > of locations being used?
>
> Our team provides development environments to our company's engineers and QA.
> In this environment, engineers and QA can freely create VMs and deploy
> applications on them.
>
> Our nginx has the role of routing requests from the internet to all
> applications deployed in this environment.
> Additionally, it allows setting IP address restrictions, BASIC
> authentication, TLS client authentication, and other configurations
> for each application.
>
> To implement these requirements, we generate a location for each application.
> Currently, there are approximately 40,000 locations in our environment.
Thank you for the details. Such configuration looks somewhat
sub-optimal, but understandable for a development / test
environment. And certainly 40k locations is a lot for the sorting
algorithm currently used.
> > Further, since each location contains configuration for
> > all modules, such configurations are expected to require a lot of
> > memory
>
> Each of our nginx processes was consuming 5GB of memory in terms of
> resident size.
> This is not a problem as our servers have sufficient memory.
>
> > Rather, I would suggest recursive top-bottom merge sort implementation
> > instead, which is much simpler and uses stack as temporary storage
> > (so it'll naturally die if there will be a queue which requires
> > more space for sorting than we have).
> >
> > Please take a look if it works for you:
>
> I think this implementation is simple and easy to understand.
> Although the number of traversals of the list will increase compared
> to bottom-up, it will not affect the order.
> I believe this will provide sufficient optimization in terms of speed.
Thanks for looking. In my limited testing, it is slightly faster
than your bottom-up implementation (and significantly faster than
the existing insertion sort when many locations are used).
Below is the full patch (code unchanged), I'll commit it as soon
as some other nginx developer will review it.
# HG changeset patch
# User Maxim Dounin <mdounin at mdounin.ru>
# Date 1696977468 -10800
# Wed Oct 11 01:37:48 2023 +0300
# Node ID b891840852ee5cc823eee1769d092ab50928919f
# Parent cdda286c0f1b4b10f30d4eb6a63fefb9b8708ecc
Core: changed ngx_queue_sort() to use merge sort.
This improves nginx startup times significantly when using very large number
of locations due computational complexity of the sorting algorithm being
used (insertion sort is O(n*n) on average, while merge sort is O(n*log(n))).
In particular, in a test configuration with 20k locations total startup
time is reduced from 8 seconds to 0.9 seconds.
Prodded by Yusuke Nojima,
https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2023-September/NUL3Y2FPPFSHMPTFTL65KXSXNTX3NQMK.html
diff --git a/src/core/ngx_queue.c b/src/core/ngx_queue.c
--- a/src/core/ngx_queue.c
+++ b/src/core/ngx_queue.c
@@ -9,6 +9,10 @@
#include <ngx_core.h>
+static void ngx_queue_merge(ngx_queue_t *queue, ngx_queue_t *tail,
+ ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *));
+
+
/*
* find the middle queue element if the queue has odd number of elements
* or the first element of the queue's second part otherwise
@@ -45,13 +49,13 @@ ngx_queue_middle(ngx_queue_t *queue)
}
-/* the stable insertion sort */
+/* the stable merge sort */
void
ngx_queue_sort(ngx_queue_t *queue,
ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
{
- ngx_queue_t *q, *prev, *next;
+ ngx_queue_t *q, tail;
q = ngx_queue_head(queue);
@@ -59,22 +63,44 @@ ngx_queue_sort(ngx_queue_t *queue,
return;
}
- for (q = ngx_queue_next(q); q != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue); q = next) {
+ q = ngx_queue_middle(queue);
+
+ ngx_queue_split(queue, q, &tail);
+
+ ngx_queue_sort(queue, cmp);
+ ngx_queue_sort(&tail, cmp);
+
+ ngx_queue_merge(queue, &tail, cmp);
+}
- prev = ngx_queue_prev(q);
- next = ngx_queue_next(q);
- ngx_queue_remove(q);
+static void
+ngx_queue_merge(ngx_queue_t *queue, ngx_queue_t *tail,
+ ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
+{
+ ngx_queue_t *q1, *q2;
+
+ q1 = ngx_queue_head(queue);
+ q2 = ngx_queue_head(tail);
- do {
- if (cmp(prev, q) <= 0) {
- break;
- }
+ for ( ;; ) {
+ if (q1 == ngx_queue_sentinel(queue)) {
+ ngx_queue_add(queue, tail);
+ break;
+ }
+
+ if (q2 == ngx_queue_sentinel(tail)) {
+ break;
+ }
- prev = ngx_queue_prev(prev);
+ if (cmp(q1, q2) <= 0) {
+ q1 = ngx_queue_next(q1);
+ continue;
+ }
- } while (prev != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue));
+ ngx_queue_remove(q2);
+ ngx_queue_insert_before(q1, q2);
- ngx_queue_insert_after(prev, q);
+ q2 = ngx_queue_head(tail);
}
}
diff --git a/src/core/ngx_queue.h b/src/core/ngx_queue.h
--- a/src/core/ngx_queue.h
+++ b/src/core/ngx_queue.h
@@ -47,6 +47,9 @@ struct ngx_queue_s {
(h)->prev = x
+#define ngx_queue_insert_before ngx_queue_insert_tail
+
+
#define ngx_queue_head(h) \
(h)->next
>
>
> 2023年9月30日(土) 12:38 Maxim Dounin <mdounin at mdounin.ru>:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 03:58:41PM +0900, Yusuke Nojima wrote:
> >
> > > # HG changeset patch
> > > # User Yusuke Nojima <nojima at ynojima.com>
> > > # Date 1679555707 -32400
> > > # Thu Mar 23 16:15:07 2023 +0900
> > > # Node ID 6aac98fb135e47ca9cf7ad7d780cf4a10e9aa55c
> > > # Parent 8771d35d55d0a2b1cefaab04401d6f837f5a05a2
> > > Improve performance when starting nginx with a lot of locations
> > >
> > > Our team has a configuration file with a very large number of
> > > locations, and we found that starting nginx with this file takes an
> > > unacceptable amount of time. After investigating the issue, we
> > > discovered that the root cause of the long startup time is the sorting
> > > of the location list.
> >
> > Interesting.
> >
> > Could you please provide some more details about the use case,
> > such as how locations are used, and what is the approximate number
> > of locations being used?
> >
> > In my practice, it is extremely uncommon to use more than 1k-10k
> > prefix locations (and even these numbers are huge for normal
> > setups). Further, since each location contains configuration for
> > all modules, such configurations are expected to require a lot of
> > memory (currently about 5-10KB per empty location, so about
> > 50-100MB per 10k locations, and 0.5-1G per 100k locations).
> > Accordingly, using other approaches such as map (assuming exact
> > match is actually needed) might be beneficial regardless of the
> > sorting costs.
> >
> > Nevertheless, swapping the sorting algorithm to a faster one looks
> > like an obvious improvement.
> >
> > >
> > > Currently, the sorting algorithm used in nginx is insertion sort,
> > > which requires O(n^2) time for n locations. We have modified the
> > > sorting algorithm to use merge sort instead, which has a time
> > > complexity of O(n log n).
> > >
> > > We have tested the modified code using micro-benchmarks and confirmed
> > > that the new algorithm improves nginx startup time significantly
> > > (shown below). We believe that this change would be valuable for other
> > > users who are experiencing similar issues.
> > >
> > >
> > > Table: nginx startup time in seconds
> > >
> > > n current patched
> > > 2000 0.033 0.018
> > > 4000 0.047 0.028
> > > 6000 0.062 0.038
> > > 8000 0.079 0.050
> > > 10000 0.091 0.065
> > > 12000 0.367 0.081
> > > 14000 0.683 0.086
> > > 16000 0.899 0.097
> > > 18000 1.145 0.110
> > > 20000 1.449 0.122
> > > 22000 1.650 0.137
> > > 24000 2.155 0.151
> > > 26000 3.096 0.155
> > > 28000 3.711 0.168
> > > 30000 3.539 0.184
> > > 32000 3.980 0.193
> > > 34000 4.543 0.208
> > > 36000 4.349 0.217
> > > 38000 5.021 0.229
> > > 40000 4.918 0.245
> > > 42000 4.835 0.256
> > > 44000 5.159 0.262
> > > 46000 5.802 0.331
> > > 48000 6.205 0.295
> > > 50000 5.701 0.308
> > > 52000 5.992 0.335
> > > 54000 6.561 0.323
> > > 56000 6.856 0.333
> > > 58000 6.515 0.347
> > > 60000 7.051 0.359
> > > 62000 6.956 0.377
> > > 64000 7.376 0.376
> > > 66000 7.506 0.404
> > > 68000 7.292 0.407
> > > 70000 7.422 0.461
> > > 72000 10.090 0.443
> > > 74000 18.505 0.463
> > > 76000 11.857 0.462
> > > 78000 9.752 0.470
> > > 80000 12.485 0.481
> > > 82000 11.027 0.498
> > > 84000 9.804 0.523
> > > 86000 8.482 0.515
> > > 88000 9.838 0.560
> > > 90000 12.341 0.546
> > > 92000 13.881 0.648
> > > 94000 8.309 0.635
> > > 96000 8.854 0.650
> > > 98000 12.871 0.674
> > > 100000 8.261 0.698
> >
> > This probably can be reduced to something like 3-5 data points.
> >
> > >
> > > diff -r 8771d35d55d0 -r 6aac98fb135e src/core/ngx_queue.c
> > > --- a/src/core/ngx_queue.c Fri Mar 10 07:43:50 2023 +0300
> > > +++ b/src/core/ngx_queue.c Thu Mar 23 16:15:07 2023 +0900
> > > @@ -45,36 +45,103 @@
> > > }
> > >
> > >
> > > -/* the stable insertion sort */
> > > +/* merge queue2 into queue1. queue2 becomes empty after merge. */
> > > +
> > > +static void
> > > +ngx_queue_merge(ngx_queue_t *queue1, ngx_queue_t *queue2,
> > > + ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
> > > +{
> > > + ngx_queue_t *p1, *p2;
> >
> > Nitpicking: there are various style issues here and in other places.
> >
> > > +
> > > + p1 = ngx_queue_head(queue1);
> > > + p2 = ngx_queue_head(queue2);
> > > +
> > > + while (p1 != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue1)
> > > + && p2 != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue2)) {
> > > +
> > > + if (cmp(p1, p2) > 0) {
> > > + ngx_queue_t *next, *prev;
> > > +
> > > + next = ngx_queue_next(p2);
> > > + ngx_queue_remove(p2);
> > > + prev = ngx_queue_prev(p1);
> > > + ngx_queue_insert_after(prev, p2);
> > > + p2 = next;
> >
> > Nitpicking: there is no need to preserve "next" here, since p2 is
> > always the head of queue2 and, and the next element can be
> > obtained by ngx_queue_head(queue2).
> >
> > Also, instead of obtaining "prev" and using
> > ngx_queue_insert_after() it would be easier to use
> > ngx_queue_insert_before(). It is not currently defined, but it is
> > trivial to define one: it is an alias to ngx_queue_insert_tail(),
> > much like ngx_queue_insert_after() is an alias to
> > ngx_queue_insert_head().
> >
> > > + } else {
> > > + p1 = ngx_queue_next(p1);
> > > + }
> > > + }
> > > + if (p2 != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue2)) {
> > > + ngx_queue_add(queue1, queue2);
> > > + ngx_queue_init(queue2);
> > > + }
> > > +}
> > > +
> > > +
> > > +/* move all elements from src to dest. dest should be empty before call. */
> > > +
> > > +static void
> > > +ngx_queue_move(ngx_queue_t *dest, ngx_queue_t *src)
> > > +{
> > > + *dest = *src;
> > > + ngx_queue_init(src);
> > > +
> > > + if (dest->next == src) {
> > > + dest->next = dest;
> > > + } else {
> > > + dest->next->prev = dest;
> > > + }
> > > + if (dest->prev == src) {
> > > + dest->prev = dest;
> > > + } else {
> > > + dest->prev->next = dest;
> > > + }
> > > +}
> >
> > This function looks strange to me. There is the ngx_queue_add()
> > macro, which probably should be used instead (if needed).
> >
> > > +
> > > +
> > > +/* the stable merge sort */
> > >
> > > void
> > > ngx_queue_sort(ngx_queue_t *queue,
> > > ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
> > > {
> > > - ngx_queue_t *q, *prev, *next;
> > > + ngx_queue_t merged[64], *p, *last;
> > >
> > > - q = ngx_queue_head(queue);
> > > -
> > > - if (q == ngx_queue_last(queue)) {
> > > + if (ngx_queue_head(queue) == ngx_queue_last(queue)) {
> > > return;
> > > }
> > >
> > > - for (q = ngx_queue_next(q); q != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue); q = next) {
> > > + last = merged;
> > >
> > > - prev = ngx_queue_prev(q);
> > > - next = ngx_queue_next(q);
> > > + while (!ngx_queue_empty(queue)) {
> > > + /*
> > > + * Loop invariant:
> > > + * merged[i] must have exactly 0 or 2^i elements in sorted order.
> > > + * For each iteration, we take one element from the given queue and
> > > + * insert it into merged without violating the invariant condition.
> > > + */
> > >
> > > - ngx_queue_remove(q);
> > > + ngx_queue_t carry, *h;
> > > +
> > > + h = ngx_queue_head(queue);
> > > + ngx_queue_remove(h);
> > > + ngx_queue_init(&carry);
> > > + ngx_queue_insert_head(&carry, h);
> > >
> > > - do {
> > > - if (cmp(prev, q) <= 0) {
> > > - break;
> > > - }
> > > + for (p = merged; p != last && !ngx_queue_empty(p); p++) {
> > > + ngx_queue_merge(p, &carry, cmp);
> > > + ngx_queue_move(&carry, p);
> > > + }
> > > + if (p == last) {
> > > + ngx_queue_init(last);
> > > + last++;
> > > + }
> > > + ngx_queue_move(p, &carry);
> > > + }
> > >
> > > - prev = ngx_queue_prev(prev);
> > > -
> > > - } while (prev != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue));
> > > -
> > > - ngx_queue_insert_after(prev, q);
> > > + /* Merge all queues into one queue */
> > > + for (p = merged + 1; p != last; p++) {
> > > + ngx_queue_merge(p, p-1, cmp);
> > > }
> > > + ngx_queue_move(queue, last-1);
> > > }
> >
> > While bottom-up merge sort implementation might be more efficient,
> > I find it disturbing to use fixed array of queues without any
> > checks if we are within the array bounds.
> >
> > Rather, I would suggest recursive top-bottom merge sort implementation
> > instead, which is much simpler and uses stack as temporary storage
> > (so it'll naturally die if there will be a queue which requires
> > more space for sorting than we have).
> >
> > Please take a look if it works for you:
> >
> > diff --git a/src/core/ngx_queue.c b/src/core/ngx_queue.c
> > --- a/src/core/ngx_queue.c
> > +++ b/src/core/ngx_queue.c
> > @@ -9,6 +9,10 @@
> > #include <ngx_core.h>
> >
> >
> > +static void ngx_queue_merge(ngx_queue_t *queue, ngx_queue_t *tail,
> > + ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *));
> > +
> > +
> > /*
> > * find the middle queue element if the queue has odd number of elements
> > * or the first element of the queue's second part otherwise
> > @@ -45,13 +49,13 @@ ngx_queue_middle(ngx_queue_t *queue)
> > }
> >
> >
> > -/* the stable insertion sort */
> > +/* the stable merge sort */
> >
> > void
> > ngx_queue_sort(ngx_queue_t *queue,
> > ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
> > {
> > - ngx_queue_t *q, *prev, *next;
> > + ngx_queue_t *q, tail;
> >
> > q = ngx_queue_head(queue);
> >
> > @@ -59,22 +63,44 @@ ngx_queue_sort(ngx_queue_t *queue,
> > return;
> > }
> >
> > - for (q = ngx_queue_next(q); q != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue); q = next) {
> > + q = ngx_queue_middle(queue);
> > +
> > + ngx_queue_split(queue, q, &tail);
> > +
> > + ngx_queue_sort(queue, cmp);
> > + ngx_queue_sort(&tail, cmp);
> > +
> > + ngx_queue_merge(queue, &tail, cmp);
> > +}
> >
> > - prev = ngx_queue_prev(q);
> > - next = ngx_queue_next(q);
> >
> > - ngx_queue_remove(q);
> > +static void
> > +ngx_queue_merge(ngx_queue_t *queue, ngx_queue_t *tail,
> > + ngx_int_t (*cmp)(const ngx_queue_t *, const ngx_queue_t *))
> > +{
> > + ngx_queue_t *q1, *q2;
> > +
> > + q1 = ngx_queue_head(queue);
> > + q2 = ngx_queue_head(tail);
> >
> > - do {
> > - if (cmp(prev, q) <= 0) {
> > - break;
> > - }
> > + for ( ;; ) {
> > + if (q1 == ngx_queue_sentinel(queue)) {
> > + ngx_queue_add(queue, tail);
> > + break;
> > + }
> > +
> > + if (q2 == ngx_queue_sentinel(tail)) {
> > + break;
> > + }
> >
> > - prev = ngx_queue_prev(prev);
> > + if (cmp(q1, q2) <= 0) {
> > + q1 = ngx_queue_next(q1);
> > + continue;
> > + }
> >
> > - } while (prev != ngx_queue_sentinel(queue));
> > + ngx_queue_remove(q2);
> > + ngx_queue_insert_before(q1, q2);
> >
> > - ngx_queue_insert_after(prev, q);
> > + q2 = ngx_queue_head(tail);
> > }
> > }
> > diff --git a/src/core/ngx_queue.h b/src/core/ngx_queue.h
> > --- a/src/core/ngx_queue.h
> > +++ b/src/core/ngx_queue.h
> > @@ -47,6 +47,9 @@ struct ngx_queue_s {
> > (h)->prev = x
> >
> >
> > +#define ngx_queue_insert_before ngx_queue_insert_tail
> > +
> > +
> > #define ngx_queue_head(h) \
> > (h)->next
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Maxim Dounin
> > http://mdounin.ru/
> > _______________________________________________
> > nginx-devel mailing list
> > nginx-devel at nginx.org
> > https://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx-devel
> _______________________________________________
> nginx-devel mailing list
> nginx-devel at nginx.org
> https://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx-devel
--
Maxim Dounin
http://mdounin.ru/
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