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Use soft values in the EntityCache; approximate entity size #490

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Description

The EntityCache currently uses a hard-coded limit of 100k entities, which is apparently intended to keep the cache around 100MB based on the assumption that entities are ~1KB.

If that assumption is not true, or if there is not even 100MB of free memory, we should not let the cache use up too much memory.

This PR adjusts the cache to use soft values to allow GC to clean up entries when memory pressure becomes too great.

Type of change

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  • Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
  • Documentation update
  • New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
  • Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to not work as expected)
  • This change requires a documentation update

How Has This Been Tested?

Added a new test in EntityCacheTest

Checklist:

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  • I have performed a self-review of my code
  • I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
  • My changes generate no new warnings

Comment on lines +56 to +57
+ value.getEntity().getProperties().length()
+ value.getEntity().getInternalProperties().length();
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The assumption here is wrong. There is no guarantee that one character is only one byte, even with "compact strings" - it's likely off by factor 2.

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It's an approximate size. Even if it's off by a factor of 10, that should be okay. A 1GB cache is greatly preferable to an unbounded cache.

public static final long WEIGHT_PER_MB = 1024 * 1024;

/* Represents the approximate size of an entity beyond the properties */
private static final int APPROXIMATE_ENTITY_OVERHEAD = 1000;
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Where does the value 1000 come from?

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@eric-maynard eric-maynard Nov 27, 2024

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See this old comment -- the apparent assumption was that entities are generally ~1KB.

This means in the worst case, we will not get a larger number of entries due to this change. It should strictly be smaller.

@@ -828,7 +828,7 @@ void dropEntity(List<PolarisEntityCore> catalogPath, PolarisEntityCore entityToD
}

/** Grant a privilege to a catalog role */
void grantPrivilege(
public void grantPrivilege(
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The changes here look unrelated?

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They are not; the EntityCacheTest was moved into a new package and so these methods were no longer callable from it if they remained package-private

.expireAfterAccess(1, TimeUnit.HOURS) // Expire entries after 1 hour of no access
.removalListener(removalListener) // Set the removal listener
.softValues() // Account for memory pressure
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Either there's a weigher or there are soft-references, the latter is IMHO a bad choice, because it can likely ruin the efficiency of the eviction.

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The docs seem to say you can do both, WDYM?

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@eric-maynard eric-maynard Nov 27, 2024

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As for soft values being a bad choice, in my experience this is quite a common practice and the degradation we're likely to see is far less than the degradation we'd see in a situation where heap space gets exhausted and we do not have soft values.

Assuming there is not significant memory pressure, my expectation is that GC should more or less ignore the SoftReference objects.

If there's a specific performance concern that can be borne out in a benchmark, we should address it.

this.byId =
Caffeine.newBuilder()
.maximumSize(100_000) // Set maximum size to 100,000 elements
.maximumWeight(100 * EntityWeigher.WEIGHT_PER_MB) // Goal is ~100MB
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While we're here - why is this always hard coded and not configurable? Or at least determined based on the actual heap size (which is not as easy as it sounds)?

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This is a good callout. My concern with making it configurable is that the limit is close to arbitrary.

As you noted in another comment, we have a "goal" of 100MB but that could really be 200MB or 1MB depending on how eviction happens with soft values and the weights. So while raising the limit definitely gets you a bigger cache, it's quite opaque as to what value you would actually want to set.

Also, the EntityCache is ideally very transparent and not something a typical end user would want to concern themselves with.

In light of the above I kept it hard-coded for now but if you feel strongly that we should make it a featureConfiguration I am comfortable doing so

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snazy commented Dec 4, 2024

Let's defer this change until the bigger CDI refactoring and potential follow-ups have been done.

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To me, this seems quite unrelated to the CDI refactoring. Clearly, we cannot pause all development on the project due to a potential conflict with another existing PR.

If there's an especially nasty conflict you're worried about here, can you highlight it? Maybe we can try to minimize the potential problem.

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snazy commented Dec 4, 2024

Sure, nobody says we shall pause everything. But how the cache is used is heavily influenced by the CDI work.

I still have concerns about the heap and CPU pressure in this PR and #433 and how it's persisted. Also, having a weigher meant to limit heap pressure but having it's calculation being largely off is IMO not good. It's also that the design has hard limits, meaning the cache cannot be as effective as it could be - and at the same time there can be an unbounded number of EntityCache instances. IMO the EntityCache needs a redesign. Because of all that, I'm not sure whether it makes sense to add more stuff to it at this point, especially since there's been no Polaris "GA" release yet, so there's no pressure to push things in.

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