SuPPort

An evented server framework designed for building scalable and introspectable services and clients based on coroutines, built at PayPal.

How to get SuPPort

pip install SuPPort

You'll also need the following system libraries for the pip install to go through smoothly:

• libssl-dev
• libffi-dev

How to use SuPPort

The main entry point into SuPPort is the Group:

import support

server_group = support.Group()

server_group.serve_forever()

Support is completely programmatically configured, so just take a look at the docstring (and examples directory) for more in-depth usage information.

When to use SuPPort

If you need a simple, but tested, preforking webserver to host a WSGI application, use SuPPort. If you need to write servers for non-web protocols, also use SuPPort. If you have a backend service, WSGI or otherwise, SuPPort is much more convenient than setting up Apache/mod_wsgi or other more complex server environments.

Motivation

Greenlet and gevent make a powerful combination, but with power comes complexity. While gevent successfully adds the necessary microthreading management and scheduling fundamentals to greenlet's concurrency primitive, we felt that there was still a significant gap between gevent's functionality and a practical, maintainable server. SuPPort is our design to bridge that gap.

Open-source foundations

SuPPort is built on top of several open-source technologies, so before we dig into the workings of SuPPort, we ought to showcase its foundations:

• gevent - Performant networking with coroutines (tutorial)
• greenlet - Python's premiere microthreading library
• clastic - Lightweight web framework free of global state
• werkzeug - Python's most popular WSGI toolkit
• faststat - Fast streaming statistics collection
• hyperloglog - Efficient cardinality estimators (paper)
• ufork - Minimal, programmatic preforking servers
• lithoxyl - Fast, transactional structured system instrumentation
• sampro - Super simple sampling profiler
• PyOpenSSL, pyasn1, pyjks, boltons, and more...

Design highlights

Even though it represents only a fraction of our Python infrastructure codebase, SuPPort still encompasses too many learnings, big and small, to list here. That said, there are a few aspects of the design worth highlighting. Many motivations have gone into building up a Python stack at PayPal, but as in any enterprise environment, we continuously aim to achieve the following:

• Interoperability
• Introspectability
• Infallibility

Of course organizations of all sizes want these features as well, but the key difference is that large organizations like PayPal usually end up building more. All while demanding a higher degree of redundancy and risk mitigation from their processes. This often results in great cost in terms of both hardware and developer productivity. Fortunately for us, Python can be very efficient in both respects.

So, let's take a stroll through a selection of SuPPort's feature set in the context of these criteria! Note that if you're unfamiliar with evented programming, nonblocking sockets, and gevent in particular, some of this may seem quite foreign. The gevent tutorial is a good entry point for the intermediate Python programmer, which can be supplemented with this well-illustrated introduction to server architectures.

Interoperability

Python usage here at PayPal has spread to virtually every imaginable use case: administrative interfaces, midtier services, operations automation, developer tools, batch jobs; you name it, Python has filled a gap in that area. This legacy has resulted in a few rather interesting abstractions exposed in SuPPort.

BufferedSocket

PayPal has hundreds of services across several tiers. Interoperating between these means having to implement over half a dozen network protocols. The BufferedSocket type eliminated our inevitable code duplication, handling a lot of the nitty-gritty of making a socket into a parser-friendly data source, while retaining timeouts for keeping communications responsive. A must-have primitive for any gevent protocol implementer.

ConnectionManager

Errors happen in live environments. DNS requests fail. Packets are lost. Latency spikes. TCP handshakes are slow. SSL handshakes are slower. Clients rarely handle these problems gracefully. This is why SuPPort includes the ConnectionManager, which provides robust error handling code for all of these cases with consistent logging and monitoring. It also provides a central point of configuration for timeouts and host fallbacks.

Introspectability

As part of a large organization, we can afford to add more machines, and are even required to keep a certain level of redundancy and idle hardware. And while DevOps is catching on in many larger-scale environments, there are many cases in enterprise environments where developers are not allowed to attend to their production code.

SuPPort currently comes with all the same general-purpose introspection capabilities that PayPal Python developers enjoy, meaning that we get you as much structured information about your application as possible without actually requiring login privileges. Of course almost every aspect of this is configurable, to suit a wide variety of environments from development to production.

Context management

Python famously has no global scope: all values are namespaced in module scope. But there are still plenty of aspects of the runtime that are global. Some are out of our control, like the OS-assigned process ID, or the VM-managed garbage collection counters. Other aspects are in our control, and best practice in concurrent programming is to keep these as well-managed as possible.

SuPPort uses a system of Contexts to explicitly manage nonlocal state, eliminating difficult-to-track implicit global state for many core functions. This has the added benefit of creating opportunities to centrally manage and monitor debugging data and statistics, made available through the MetaApplication below.

(Figure 1: see the examples of charts in the the static directory)

MetaApplication

While not exclusively a web server framework, SuPPort leverages its strong roots in the web to provide both a web-based user interface and API full of useful runtime information.

(Figure 2: see the examples of the MetaApplication in the static directory)

As you can see above, there is a lot of information exposed through this default interface. This is partly because of restricted environments not allowing local login on machines, and another part is the relative convenience of a browser for most developers. Not pictured is the feature that the same information is available in JSON format for easy programmatic consumption. Because this application is such a rich source of information, we recommend using SuPPort to run it on a separate port which can be firewalled accordingly, as seen in this example.

Infallibility

At the end of the day, reliability over long periods of time is what earns a stack approval and adoption. At this point, the SuPPort architecture has a billion production requests under its belt here at PayPal, but on the way we put it through the proverbial paces. At various points, we have tested and confirmed these edge behaviors. Here are just a few key characteristics of a well-behaved application:

• Gracefully sheds traffic under load (no unbounded queues here)
• Can and has run at 90%+ CPU load for days at a time
• Is free from framework memory leaks
• Is robust to memory leakage in user code

To illustrate, a live service handling millions of requests per day had a version of OpenSSL installed which was leaking memory on every handshake. Thanks to preemptive worker cycling on excessive process memory usage, no intervention was required and no customers were impacted. The worker cycling was noted in the logs, the leak was traced to OpenSSL, and operations was notified. The problem was fixed with the next regularly scheduled release rather than being handled as a crisis.

No monkeypatching

One of the first and sometimes only ways that people experience gevent is through monkeypatching. At the top of your main module you issue a call to gevent that automatically swaps out virtually all system libraries with their cooperatively concurrent ones. This sort of magic is relatively rare in Python programming, and rightfully so. Implicit activities like this can have unexpected consequences. SuPPort is a no-monkeypatching approach to gevent. If you want to implement your own network-level code, it is best to use gevent.socket directly. If you want gevent-incompatible libraries to work with gevent, best to use SuPPort's gevent-based threadpooling capabilities, detailed below:

Using threads with gevent

"Threads? In my gevent? I thought the whole point of greenlets and gevent was to eliminate evil, evil threads!" --Countless strawmen

Originating in Stackless and ported over in 2004 by Armin Rigo (of PyPy fame), greenlets are mature and powerful concurrency primitives. We wanted to add that power to the process- and thread-based world of POSIX. There's no point running from standard OS capabilities; threads have their place. Many architectures adopt a thread-per-request or process-per-request model, but the last thing we want is the number of threads going up as load increases. Threads are expensive; each thread adds a bit of contention to the mix, and in many environments the memory overhead alone, typically 4-8MB per thread, presents a problem. At just a few kilobytes apiece, greenlet's microthreads are three orders of magnitude less costly.

Furthermore, thread usage in our architecture is hardly about parallelism; we use worker processes for that. In the SuPPort world, threads are about preemption. Cooperative greenlets are much more efficient overall, but sometimes you really do need guarantees about responsiveness.

One excellent example of how threads provide this responsiveness is the ThreadQueueServer detailed below. But first, there are two built-in Threadpools with decorators worth highlighting, io_bound and cpu_bound:

io_bound

This decorator is primarily used to wrap opaque clients built without affordances for cooperative concurrent IO. We use this to wrap cx_Oracle and other C-based clients that are built for thread-based parallelization. Other major use cases for io_bound is when getting input from standard input (stdin) and files.

(Figure 3: see worker_closeup.png in the static directory)

cpu_bound

The cpu_bound decorator is used to wrap expensive operations that would halt the event loop for too long. We use it to wrap long-running cryptography and serialization tasks, such as decrypting private SSL certificates or loading huge blobs of XML and JSON. Because the majority of use cases' implementations do not release the Global Interpreter Lock, the cpu_bound ThreadPool is actually just a pool of one thread, to minimize CPU contention from multiple unparallelizable CPU-intensive tasks.

It's worth noting that some deserialization tasks are not worth the overhead of dispatching to a separate thread. If the data to be deserialized is very short or a result is already cached. For these cases, we have the cpu_bound_if decorator, which conditionally dispatches to the thread, yielding slightly higher responsiveness for low-complexity requests.

Also note that both of these decorators are reentrant, making dispatch idempotent. If you decorate a function that itself eventually calls a decorated function, performance won't pay the thread dispatch tax twice.

ThreadQueueServer

The ThreadQueueServer exists as an enhanced approach to pulling new connections off of a server's listening socket. It's SuPPort's way of incorporating an industry-standard practice, commonly associated with nginx and Apache, into the gevent WSGI server world.

If you've read this far into the post, you're probably familiar with the standard multi-worker preforking server architecture; a parent process opens a listening socket, forks one or more children that inherit the socket, and the kernel manages which worker gets which incoming client connection.

(Figure 4: see basic_prefork_workers.png in the static directory)

The problem with this approach is that it generally results in inefficient distribution of connections, and can lead to some workers being overloaded while others have cycles to spare. Plus, all worker processes are woken up by the kernel in a race to accept a single inbound connection, in what's commonly referred to as the thundering herd.

The solution implemented here uses a thread that sleeps on accept, removing connections from the kernel's listen queue as soon as possible, then explicitly pushing accepted connections to the main event loop. The ability to inspect this user-space connection queue enables not only even distribution but also intelligent behavior under high load, such as closing incoming connections when the backlog gets too long. This fail-fast approach prevents the kernel from holding open fully-established connections that cannot be reached in a reasonable amount of time. This backpressure takes the wait out of client failure scenarios leading to a more responsive extrinsic system, as well.

What's next for SuPPort

The sections above highlight just a small selection of the features already in SuPPort, and there are many more to cover in future posts. In addition to those, we will also be distilling more code from our internal codebase out into the open. Among these we are particularly excited about:

• Enhanced human-readable structured logging
• Advanced network security functionality based on OpenSSL
• Distributed online statistics collection
• Additional generalizations for TCP client infrastructure

And of course, more tests! As soon as we get a couple more features distilled out, we'll start porting out more than the skeleton tests we have now. Suffice to say, we're really looking forward to expanding our set of codified concurrent software learnings, and incorporating as much community feedback as possible, so don't forget to watch the repo and subscribe to the blog.

Mahmoud Hashemi, Kurt Rose, Mark Williams, and Chris Lane

Appendix: What SuPPort is (and is not)

• SuPPort is an architectural supplement to gevent
• SuPPort is still under active development
• SuPPort is built for robustness and development speed in the face of a wide range of developer skill levels and environmental complexities
• SuPPort is not interested in being the next darling of microbenchmarks; it focuses on consistent, robust behavior.
• SuPPort is one of many effective arrangements of open-source software into a cohesive whole