So soon, beta 2

I’m delighted by the level of response to my protobuf-net v2 beta; I have been kept really busy with a range of questions, feature requests and bug fixes (almost exclusively limited to the new features).

So, before I annoy people with too many “fixed in source” comments, I thought I’d better re-deploy. Beta 2 gives the same as beta 1, but with:

• reference-tracked objects
  • root object now included (BREAKING CHANGE)
  • fixed false-positive recursion issue
• full type metadata
  • support custom formatting/parsing
• interface serialization
  • support serialization from interfaces
  • support known-implementations of interfaces
  • support default concrete type
• WCF
  • expose WCF types on public API to allow custom models
• misc
  • support shadow set-methods
  • fix IL glitch
  • fix cold-start thread-race condition
  • fix missing method-forwarding from legacy non-generic API

In addition to a very encouraging level of interest, I’m also pleased that things like the interface-based support mentioned above were pretty effortless to push through the v2 type-model. These are things that had been proposed previously, but there was just no way to push them into the codebase without hideous (and cumulative) hackery. With v2, it was pretty much a breeze.

But for v2 fun see the project download page

And please, keep pestering me ;p

Note that the BREAKING CHANGE marked above only applies to data serialized with the new full-graph AsReference option. No v1 data is impacted, but if you have stored data from earlier v2 alpha/beta code, please drop me a line and I can advise.

protobuf-net v2, beta

It has been a long time in the coming, I know. I make no excuses, but various other things have meant that it didn’t get much input for a while…

But! I’m happy to say that I’ve just pushed a beta download up onto the project site

So… this v2… what is it?

Basically, it is still the core protobuf stream, but against all the safe advice of my employer I rewrote the entire core. For many reasons:

• the original design grew organically, and ideas that seemed good turned to make for some problematic code later
• the vast overuse of generics (and in particular, generics at runtime via reflection) was really hurting some platforms
• there were many things the design could not readily support – structs, runtime models, pre-built serialization dlls, usage on mobile devices, etc
• the code path at runtime was just not as minimal as I would like
• and a myriad of other things

So… I rewrote it. Fortunately I had a barrage of integration tests, which grew yet further during this exercise. The way I figured, I had 2 choices here:

• go with a richer code-generator to use as a build task (not runtime)
• go crazy with meta-programming

After some thought, I opted for the latter. In particular, this would (in my reasoning) give me lots of flexibility for keeping things runtime based (where you are able to, at least), and would be a good opportunity to have some fun and learn IL emit to dangerous levels (which, incidentally, turns out to be very valuable – hence mine and Sam’s work on dapper-dot-net).

So what is new?

I don’t claim this list is exhaustive:

• the ability to define models at runtime (also useful for working with types you don’t control) (example)
• the ability to have separate models for the same types
• pre-generation to dll
• runtime performance improvements
• support for structs
• support for immutable objects via surrogates (example)
• the ability to run on mobile platforms (unity, wp7 – and perhaps moot for a while: MonoDroid, MonoTouch – but presumably Xamarin)
• the ability to serialize object graphs preserving references (example)
• the ability to work with types not known in advance (same)
• probably about 40 other things that slip my mind

I’ll try to go into each of these in detail when I can

And what isn’t there yet?

This is beta; at some point I had to make a milestone cut – but some things aren’t quite complete yet; these are not usually needed (hint: I’m happy to use protobuf-net v2 on my employer’s code-base, so I have confidence in it, and confidence that the core paths have been smoke-tested)

But things that definitely aren’t there in the beta

• WCF hooks
• VS tooling (it is just the core runtime dlls)
• round-trip safe / “extension” fields
• extraction of .proto (schema) files from a model
• my build / deploy script needs an overhaul
• tons of documentation / examples
• tooling to make the “mobile” story easier (but; it should work – it is being used in a few, for example)

But; have at it

If you want to play with it, go ahead. I only ask that if something behaves unexpectedly, drop me a line before declaring loudly “it sux, dude!”. It might just need some guidance, or maybe even a code fix (I’m far from perfect).

Likewise, any feature suggestions, etc; let me know.

Completion tasks - the easy way

One of the good things about doing things in public – people point out when you’ve missed a trick.

Just the other day, I was moaning about how Task seemed too tightly coupled to schedulers, and wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Task that just allowed you to indicate success/failure – I even went so far as to write some experimental code to do just that.

So you can predict what comes next; it already existed – I just didn’t know about it. I give you TaskCompletionSource<T>, which has SetResult(…), SetException(…) and a Task property. Everything I need (except maybe support for result-free tasks, but I can work around that).

And wouldn’t you believe it, the TPL folks shine again, easily doubling my lousy performance, and trebling (or more) the performance compared to “faking it” via RunSynchronously:

Future (uncontested): 1976ms // my offering
Task (uncontested): 4149ms // TPL Task via RunSynchronously
Source (uncontested): 765ms // via TaskCompletionSource
Future (contested): 5608ms
Task (contested): 6982ms
Source (contested): 2389ms

I am hugely indebted to Sam Jack, who corrected me via a comment on the blog entry. Cheers!

Musings on async

OUT OF DATE: SEE UPDATE

For BookSleeve, I wanted an API that would work with current C#/.NET, but which would also mesh directly into C# 5 with the async/await pattern. The obvious option there was the Task API, which is familiar to anyone who has used the TPL in .NET 4.0, but which gains extension methods with the Async CTP to enable async/await.

This works, but in the process I found a few niggles that made me have a few doubts:

Completion without local scheduling

In my process, I never really want to schedule a task; the task is performed on a separate server, and what I really want to do is signal that something is now complete. There isn’t really an API for that on Task (since it is geared more for operations you are running locally, typically in parallel). The closest you can do is to ask the default scheduler to run your task immediately, but this feels a bit ungainly, not least because task-schedulers are not required to offer synchronous support.

In my use-case, I’m not even remotely interested in scheduling; personally I’d quite like it if Task supported this mode of use in isolation, perhaps via a protected method and a subclass of Task.

(yes, there is RunSynchronously, but that just uses the current scheduler, which in library code you can’t assume is capable of actually running synchronously).

Death by exception

The task API is also pretty fussy about errors – which isn’t unreasonable. If a task fails and you don’t explicitly observe the exception (by asking it for the result, etc), then it intentionally re-surfaces that exception in a finalizer. Having a finalizer is note-worthy in itself, and you get one last chance to convince the API that you’re sane – but if you forget to hook that exception it is a process-killer.

So what would it take to do it ourselves?

So: what is involved in writing our own sync+async friendly API? It turns out it isn’t that hard; in common with things like LINQ (and foreach if you really want), the async API is pattern-based rather than interface-based; this is convenient for retro-fitting the async tools onto existing APIs without changing existing interfaces.

What you need (in the Async CTP Refresh for VS2010 SP1) is:

• Some GetAwaiter() method (possibly but not necessarily an extension method) that returns something with all of:
• A boolean IsCompleted property (get)
• A void OnCompleted(Action callback)
• A GetResult() method which returns void, or the desired outcome of the awaited operation

So this isn’t a hugely challenging API to implement if you want to write a custom awaitable object. I have a working implementation that I put together with BookSleeve in mind. Highlights:

• Acts as a set-once value with wait (sync) and continuation (async) support
• Thread-safe
• Isolated from the TPL, and scheduling in particular
• Based on Monitor, but allowing efficient re-use of the object used as the sync-lock (my understanding is that once used/contested in a Monitor, the object instance obtains additional cost; may as well minimise that)
• Supporting typed (Future<T>) or untyped (Future) usage – compares to Task<T> and Task respectively

My local tests aren’t exhaustive, but (over 500,000 batches of 10 operations each), I get:

Future (uncontested): 1993ms
Task (uncontested): 4126ms
Future (contested): 5487ms
Task (contested): 6787ms

So our custom awaitable object is faster… but I’m just not convinced that it is enough of an improvement to justify changing away from the Task API. This call density is somewhat artificial, and we’re talking less than a µs per-operation difference.

Conclusions

In some ways I’m pleasantly surprised with the results; if Task is keeping up (more or less), even outside of it’s primary design case, then I think we should forget about it; use Task, and move on to the actual meat of the problem we are trying to solve.

However, I’ll leave my experimental Future/Future<T> code as reference only off on the side of BookSleeve – in case anybody else feels the need for a non-TPL implementation. I’m not saying mine is ideal, but it works reasonably.

But: I will not be changing away from Task / Task<T> at this time. I’m passionate about performance, but I’m not (quite) crazy; I’ll take the more typical and more highly-tested Task API that has been put together by people who really, really understand threading optimisation, to quite ludicrous levels.

Practical Profiling

If you don’t know what is causing delays, you are doomed to performance woes. Performance is something I care about deeply, and there are no end of performance / profiling tools available for .NET. Some invasive and detailed, some at a higher level. And quite often, tools that you wouldn’t leave plugged into your production code 24/7.

Yet… I care about my production environment 24/7; and trying to reproduce a simulated load for the sites I work on can be  somewhat challenging. So how can we get realistic and detailed data without adversely impacting the system?

Keep It Simple, Stupid

A common strapline in agile programming states:

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

Now, I don’t profess to be strictly “agile”, or indeed strictly anything (except maybe “pragmatic”) in my development process, but there is much wisdom in the above. And it makes perfect sense when wanting to add constant (live) profiling capabilities.

So what is the simplest thing that could possibly work with profiling? Automated instrumentation? Process polling on the debugging API? Way too invasive. IoC/DI chaining with profiling decorators? Overkill. AOP with something like PostSharp? Unnecessary complexity. How about we just tell the system openly what we are doing?

Heresy! That isn’t part of the system! It has no place in the codebase!

Well, firstly – remember I said I was “pragmatic”, and secondly (more importantly) performance is both a requirement and a feature, so I have no qualms whatsoever changing my code to improve our measurements.

So what are you talking about?

Frustrated by the inconvenience of many of the automated profiling tools, I cobbled together the simplest, hackiest, yet fully working mini-profiler – and I thought I’d share. What I want is as a developer, to be able to review the performance of pages I’m viewing in the production environment – sure, this doesn’t cover every scenario, but it certainly does the job on sites that are read-intensive. So say I browse to “http://mysite/grobbits/MK2-super-grobit” – I want immediate access to how that page was constructed (and where the pain was). And in particular, I want it live so I can hit “refresh” a few times and watch how it behaves as different caches expire. Nothing rocket-science, just a basic tool that will let me hone in on the unexpected performance bumps. Finally, it can’t impact performance the 99.99% of regular users who will never see that data.

I’m currently having great success using this mini tool; the concept is simple – you have a MiniProfiler object (which would be null for most users), and you just surround the interesting code:

using (profiler.Step("Set page title"))
{
    ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!";
}

using (profiler.Step("Doing complex stuff"))
{
    using (profiler.Step("Step A"))
    { // something more interesting here
        Thread.Sleep(100);
    }
    using (profiler.Step("Step B"))
    { // and here
        Thread.Sleep(250);
    }
}

(the Step(…) method is implemented as an extension method, so it is perfectly happy operating on a null reference; which is a crude but simple way of short-circuiting the timings for regular users)

Obviously this isn’t very sophisticated, and it isn’t meant to be – but it is very fast, and easy to make as granular as you like as you focus in on some specific knot of code that is hurting. But for the simplicity, it is remarkably useful in finding trouble spots on your key pages, and reviewing ongoing performance.

So what do I see?

The output is very basic functional – you simply get a call tree of the code you’ve marked as interesting (above), to whatever granularity you marked it to; no more, no less. So with the sample project (see below), the home-page displays (in the html markup):

<!--
MYPC at 19/04/2011 11:28:12
Path: http://localhost:3324/
 http://localhost:3324/ = 376.9ms
> Set page title = 0ms
> Doing complex stuff = 349.3ms
>> Step A = 99.3ms
>> Step B = 250ms
> OnResultExecuting = 27.5ms
>> Some complex thinking = 24.8ms
-->

(for your developers only; there is no change for users without the profiler enabled)

Stop waffling, Man!

Anyway, if you have similar (high-level, but live) profiling needs, I’ve thrown the mini-profiler onto google-code and NuGet, along with a tweaked version of the MVC3 (razor) sample project to show typical usage. Actually, you only need a single C# file (it really is basic code, honest).

• If you find it useful, let me know!
• If it sucks, let me know!
• If I’ve gone mad, let me know!
• I’ve you’ve gone mad, keep that to yourself.

async Redis await BookSleeve

UPDATE

BookSleeve has now been succeeded by StackExchange.Redis, for lots of reasons. The API and intent is similar, but the changes are significant enough that we had to reboot. All further development will be in StackExchange.Redis, not BookSleeve.

ORIGINAL CONTENT

At Stack Exchange, performance is a feature we work hard at. Crazy hard. Whether that means sponsoring load-balancer features to reduce system impact, or trying to out-do the ORM folks on their own turf.

One of the many tools in our performance toolkit is Redis; a highly performant key-value store that we use in various ways:

• as our second-level cache
• for various tracking etc counters, that we really don’t want to bother SQL Server about
• for our pub/sub channels
• for various other things that don’t need to go direct to SQL Server

It is really fast; we were using the redis-sharp bindings and they served us well. I have much thanks for redis-sharp, and my intent here is not to critique it at all – but rather to highlight that in some environments you might need that extra turn of the wheel. First some context:

• Redis itself is single threaded supporting multiple connections
• the Stack Exchange sites work in a multi-tenancy configuration, and in the case of Redis we partition (mainly) into Redis databases
• to reduce overheads (both handshakes etc and OS resources like sockets) we re-use our Redis connection(s)
• but since redis-sharp is not thread-safe we need to synchronize access to the connection
• and since redis-sharp is synchronous we need to block while we get each response
• and since we are split over Redis databases we might also first have to block while we select database

Now, LAN latency is low; most estimates put it at around 0.3ms per call – but this adds up, especially if you might be blocking other callers behind you. And even more so given that you might not even care what the response is (yes, I know we could offload that somewhere so that it doesn’t impact the current request, but we would still end up adding blocking for requests that do care).

Enter BookSleeve

Seriously, what now? What on earth is BookSleeve?

As a result of the above, we decided to write a bespoke Redis client with specific goals around solving these problems. Essentially it is a wrapper around Redis dictionary storage; and what do you call a wrapper around a dictionary? A book-sleeve. Yeah, I didn’t get it at first, but naming stuff is hard.

And we’re giving it away (under the Apache License 2.0)! Stack Exchange is happy to release our efforts here as open source, which is groovy.

So; what are the goals?

• to operate as a fully-functional Redis client (obviously)
• to be thread-safe and non-blocking
• to support implicit database switching to help with multi-tenancy scenarios
• to be on-par with redis-sharp on like scenarios (i.e. a complete request/response cycle)
• to allow absolute minimum cost fire-and-forget usage (for when you don’t care what the reply is, and errors will be handled separately)
• to allow use as a “future” – i.e request some data from Redis and start some other work while it is on the wire, and merge in the Redis reply when available
• to allow use with callbacks for when you need the reply, but not necessarily as part of the current request
• to allow C# 5 continuation usage (aka async/await)
• to allow fully pipelined usage – i.e. issue 200 requests before we’ve even got the first response
• to allow fully multiplexed usage – i.e. it must handle meshing the responses from different callers on different threads and on different databases but on the same connection back to the originator

(actually, Stack Exchange didn’t strictly need the C# 5 scenario; I added that while moving it to open-source, but it is an excellent fit)

Where are we? And where can I try it?

It exists; it works; it even passes some of the tests! And it is fast. It still needs some tidying, some documentation, and more tests, but I offer you BookSleeve:

http://code.google.com/p/booksleeve/

The API is very basic and should be instantly familiar to anyone who has used Redis; and documentation will be added.

In truth, the version I’m open-sourcing is more like the offspring of the version we’re currently using in production – you tend to learn a lot the first time through. But as soon as we can validate it, Stack Exchange will be using BookSleeve too.

So how about some numbers

These are based on my dev machine, running redis on the same machine, so I also include estimates using the 0.3ms latency per request as mentioned above.

In each test we are doing 5000 INCR commands (purely as an arbitrary test); spread over 5 databases, in a round-robin in batches of 10 per db – i.e. 10 on db #0, 10 on db #1, … 10 on db #4 – so that is an additional 500 SELECT commands too.

redis-sharp:

• to completion 430ms
• (not meaningful to measure fire-and-forget)
• to completion assuming 0.3ms LAN latency: 2080ms

BookSleeve

• to completion 391ms
• 2ms fire-and-forget
• to completion assuming 0.3ms LAN latency: 391ms

The last 2 are the key, in particular noting that the time we aren’t waiting on LAN latency is otherwise-blocking time we have subtracted for other callers (web servers tend to have more than one thing happening…); the fire-and-forget performance allows us to do a lot of operations without blocking the current caller.

As a bonus we have added to ability to do genuinely parallel work on a single caller – by starting a Redis request first, doing the other work (TSQL typically), and then asking for the Redis result. And let’s face it, while TSQL is versatile, Redis is so fast that it would be quite unusual for the Redis reply to not to already be there by the time you get to look.

Wait – did you say C# 5?

Yep; because the API is task based, it can be used in any of 3 ways without needing separate APIs:

• synchronous (blocking on the response) via Wait
• asynchronous (callback-based) via ContinueWith
• async/await by using the Async CTP (edit or for VS2010 SP1) and C# 5 language features

As an example of the last:

IMPORTANT: in the above “await” does not mean “block until this is done” – it means “yield back to the caller here, and run the rest as a callback when the answer is available” – or for a better definition see Eric Lippert’s blog series.

And did I mention…

…that a high perfomance binary-based dictionary store works well when coupled with a high performance binary serializer? ;p

Objects, Graphs and all that Jazz

protobuf-net v2 ticks along slowly; I’m embarrassed to say that due to a combination of factors progress has been slower than I would have liked – and for purely human reasons (availability etc).

But; I thought I’d better update with the tweaks I’m looking at currently; they have all been ticking along in the back of head for ages, but frankly people kept nagging me to provide them, so who am I to argue?

Caveat

This is all work-in-progress; don’t try to pull the trunk and shove it into production! Soon… I should also stress that all of the thoughts described below are outside the interoperable protobuf spec; it’ll still be a valid protobuf stream, but this only applies to protobuf-net talking to protobuf-net.

So; here’s some common questions I get…

Type meta

The serialization is fine, but I don’t know (and cannot know) all of my types up front. How can I do this?

Well, protobuf is a contract based format; if you don’t know the types, it will struggle – as will any contract based serializer…

Yes, I get that; now: how do I do it?

Now, I’ve held off putting any meta in the stream for various reasons:

• it steps far outside the core protobuf spec
• it flashes the warning signs of BinaryFormatter, my nemesis

But, so many people seem to want this that I think I have to buckle; but on my terms! So in v2, I’m adding the ability to indicate that (on a per-member basis) objects should resolve their type information from the stream. By default, by embedding the assembly-qualified-name, but providing an abstraction layer over that allowing you to provide your own string<===>Type map (and thus avoiding the knots in by stomach caused by too much type dependency).

Full graphs

The serialization is fine, but my data is a graph, not a tree. How can I do this?

Well, protobuf is a tree format; it doesn’t work like that…

Yes, I get that; now: how do I do it?

(by the way, are you spotting a pattern in the questions I get?)

Type meta is something I didn’t want to add, but graph support is something I have really wanted to sneak in; breaking all the rules with type meta seems a reasonable excuse. So in v2, I’m adding the ability (on a per-member basis) to use reference tracking to (de)serialize a complete object graph (except events; don’t get me started on that…). A minor complication here is that for technical reasons it is a nightmare to support this concurrently with inheritance (which, btw, the core protobuf doesn’t support – I feel quite the anarchist here…); but I can support it in conjunction with type meta; so you still get to keep inheritance, but implemented differently.

Repeated strings

It is fairly common to have repeated string data in a large graph. As an offshoot of full-graph support, we also get a mechanism to support string re-use for free; woot! So again, in v2 I’ll be enabling this on a per-member basis.

Footnote

All of this goes so far outside of the protobuf spec that I have little right to even call it protobuf-related any more; maybe I should force the caller to explicitly set an EnableImplementationSpecificOptions flag? So there is an portable core with some opt-in hacks for these random options.

And again; this whole area is under development; I’m working on it, honest!

That’s great! My full-graph of dynamic objects using inheritance and string re-use works fine! Now how do I load it into my c++/java/php/python/whatever client?

Don’t make me hurt you…