…apply
Informs cockroachdb#17500.
This is a partial revival of cockroachdb#18710 and a culmination of more recent
thinking in cockroachdb#17500 (comment).
The change adjusts the Raft processing loop so that it acknowledges the success
of raft entries as soon as it learns that they have been durably committed to
the raft log instead of after they have been applied to the proposer replica's
replicated state machine. This not only pulls the application latency out of the
hot path for Raft proposals, but it also pulls the next raft ready iteration's
write to its Raft log (with the associated fsync) out of the hot path for Raft
proposals.
This is safe because a proposal through raft is known to have succeeded as
soon as it is replicated to a quorum of replicas (i.e. has committed in the
raft log). The proposal does not need to wait for its effects to be applied
in order to know whether its changes will succeed or fail. The raft log is
the provider of atomicity and durability for replicated writes, not (ignoring
log truncation) the replicated state machine itself, so a client can be
confident in the result of a write as soon as the raft log confirms that it
has succeeded.
However, there are a few complications to acknowledging the success of a
proposal at this stage:
1. Committing an entry in the raft log and having the command in that entry
succeed are similar but not equivalent concepts. Even if the entry succeeds
in achieving durability by replicating to a quorum of replicas, its command
may still be rejected "beneath raft". This means that a (deterministic)
check after replication decides that the command will not be applied to the
replicated state machine. In that case, the client waiting on the result of
the command should not be informed of its success. Luckily, this check is
cheap to perform so we can do it here and when applying the command. See
Replica.shouldApplyCommand.
2. Some commands perform non-trivial work such as updating Replica configuration
state or performing Range splits. In those cases, it's likely that the client
is interested in not only knowing whether it has succeeded in sequencing the
change in the raft log, but also in knowing when the change has gone into
effect. There's currently no exposed hook to ask for an acknowledgement only
after a command has been applied, so for simplicity the current implementation
only ever acks transactional writes before they have gone into effect. All
other commands wait until they have been applied to ack their client.
3. Even though we can determine whether a command has succeeded without applying
it, the effect of the command will not be visible to conflicting commands until
it is applied. Because of this, the client can be informed of the success of
a write at this point, but we cannot release that write's latches until the
write has applied. See ProposalData.signalProposalResult/finishApplication.
\### Benchmarks
The change appears to result in an **8-10%** improvement to throughput and a
**6-10%** reduction in p50 latency across the board on kv0. I ran a series of
tests with different node sizes and difference workload concurrencies and the
win seemed pretty stable. This was also true regardless of whether the writes
were to a single Raft group or a large number of Raft groups.
```
name old ops/sec new ops/sec delta
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=32 24.1k ± 0% 26.1k ± 1% +8.35% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=48 30.4k ± 1% 32.8k ± 1% +8.02% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=64 34.6k ± 1% 37.6k ± 0% +8.79% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=72 46.6k ± 1% 50.8k ± 0% +8.99% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=108 58.8k ± 1% 64.0k ± 1% +8.99% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=144 68.1k ± 1% 74.5k ± 1% +9.45% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=144 55.8k ± 1% 59.7k ± 2% +7.12% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=216 64.4k ± 4% 68.1k ± 4% +5.65% (p=0.016 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=288 68.8k ± 2% 74.5k ± 3% +8.39% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
name old p50(ms) new p50(ms) delta
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=32 1.30 ± 0% 1.20 ± 0% -7.69% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=48 1.50 ± 0% 1.40 ± 0% -6.67% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=64 1.70 ± 0% 1.60 ± 0% -5.88% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=72 1.40 ± 0% 1.30 ± 0% -7.14% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=108 1.60 ± 0% 1.50 ± 0% -6.25% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=144 1.84 ± 3% 1.70 ± 0% -7.61% (p=0.000 n=5+4)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=144 2.00 ± 0% 1.80 ± 0% -10.00% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=216 2.46 ± 2% 2.20 ± 0% -10.57% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=288 2.80 ± 0% 2.60 ± 0% -7.14% (p=0.079 n=4+5)
name old p99(ms) new p99(ms) delta
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=32 3.50 ± 0% 3.50 ± 0% ~ (all equal)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=48 4.70 ± 0% 4.58 ± 3% ~ (p=0.167 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=16/nodes=3/conc=64 5.50 ± 0% 5.20 ± 0% -5.45% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=72 5.00 ± 0% 4.70 ± 0% -6.00% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=108 5.80 ± 0% 5.50 ± 0% -5.17% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=36/nodes=3/conc=144 6.48 ± 3% 6.18 ± 3% -4.63% (p=0.079 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=144 11.0 ± 0% 10.5 ± 0% -4.55% (p=0.008 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=216 13.4 ± 2% 13.2 ± 5% ~ (p=0.683 n=5+5)
kv0/cores=72/nodes=3/conc=288 18.2 ± 4% 17.2 ± 3% -5.70% (p=0.079 n=5+5)
```
Release note (performance improvement): Raft entries no longer wait to
be applied to the RocksDB storage engine before signaling their success
to clients, they now only wait until they are committed in their Raft log.