iOS · Open source · Those easily-missed type details in ios-opensource

145
IOr/ios-opensource·posted by tang_hao·yesterdayDiscussion

Those easily-missed type details in ios-opensource

Most ios-opensource articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.

What genuinely surprised me was the tail. The average looked great while P99 jumped by an order of magnitude past some threshold. The cause was not ios-opensource itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.

We also fixed monitoring along the way: replaced average-based alerts with percentiles and split them per endpoint. False alerts dropped by about seventy percent and the on-call rotation visibly cheered up.

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81 comments

81 comments

M
Bbob_chen·2 days ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

502
Kkite·2 days ago

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

242
Aalice_devOPMod·2 days ago

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

519
Ddev_zhou·2 days ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

91
Zzhu_zong·2 days ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

486
Zzhu_zongMod·2 days ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

423
Kkite·28 minutes ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

409
Sswoole_lee·yesterday

This is not a ios-opensource problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

373
Sswoole_lee·2 days ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

200
Rran_bo·2 hours ago

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

11
Mmike_xu·2 days ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

471
Hhuang_keMod·2 days ago

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

238
Rrase·28 minutes ago

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

136
Wwinter·2 days agoeditedLevel 6

This is not a ios-opensource problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

4
Kkernel_panic·2 days ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

308
Zzhu_zong·2 days ago

This is not a ios-opensource problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

62
Bbob_chen·3 minutes ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

296
Llinlin·28 minutes ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

278
Zzhu_zong·28 minutes ago

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

2
Nnikic·just now

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

520
Kkernel_panicOP·just now

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

61
Kkernel_panic·2 days ago

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

339
Zzhou_yiOP·2 days ago

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

4
Kkernel_panic·2 days agoLevel 6

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

421
Zzhu_zong·2 hours agoLevel 6

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

137
Nnikic·28 minutes ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

8
Nnikic·2 days agoeditedLevel 6

This is not a ios-opensource problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

200
Sslow_query·12 minutes ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

23
Wwinter·2 days agoedited

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

51
Mmike_xuOP·3 minutes ago

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

197
Lli_ming·2 days ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

247
Hhuang_keOP·2 days ago

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

178
WwinterOP·2 days ago

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

149
Nnikic·12 minutes ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

57
Ddev_zhou·2 days ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

181
Rrase·2 days ago

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

169
Zzhu_zong·5 hours ago

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

160
Cchen_devOP·3 minutes ago

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

53
Zzhou_yi·5 hours ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

109
Wwinter·28 minutes ago

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

102
Ddev_zhou·2 days ago

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

261
Cchen_dev·2 days ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

190
Hhuang_ke·12 minutes ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

81
Aalice_dev·2 days ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

77
Sswoole_lee·2 days ago

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

62
Lli_ming·2 days ago

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

55
Rrase·2 days ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

49
Sslow_query·2 days ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

47
Rran_bo·3 minutes ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

46
Ttang_hao·5 hours ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

35
Kkite·2 days ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

88
Lli_ming·2 days ago

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

30
Mmike_xu·5 hours agoedited

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

28
Rran_bo·2 days ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

281
Mmike_xu·2 days ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

2
Llinlin·2 days ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

369
Nnikic·2 days ago

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

49
Cchen_dev·2 days agoLevel 6

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

239
Rrase·2 days agoedited

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

46
Oops_wangMod·12 minutes ago

This is not a ios-opensource problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

29
Oops_wang·3 minutes ago

One counter-example: below ios-opensource 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

7
Zzhou_yi·2 days ago

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

503
Rran_bo·2 days ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

23
Bbob_chen·2 days ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

19
Kkernel_panic·2 days ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

17
Sswoole_lee·2 days ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

19
Oops_wang·2 hours agoedited

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

14
Lli_ming·2 days ago

I just read the ios-opensource source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

224
Hhuang_ke·12 minutes agoedited

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

3
Zzhou_yi·3 minutes ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

10
Hhuang_ke·2 days ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

97
KkiteMod·2 days ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

4
Rran_bo·2 days ago

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

123
Llinlin·2 days ago

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

4
Kkernel_panic·2 days agoedited

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

3
Zzhu_zong·12 minutes ago

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

2
Kkite·2 days ago

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

1
Ddev_zhou·2 days ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

25
Ddev_zhouOP·yesterdayedited

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

294
Nnikic·2 days ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

458
Zzhou_yi·2 days ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

255

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