Purged

From Wikitech

purged (pronounced "purge-dee") is a daemon running on all cache hosts that reads Kafka purge messages, parses them, and turns them into HTTP purge requests to be sent to the local ATS and Varnish daemons (via TCP or Unix sockets).

Detailed information about running purged instances can be found on this Grafana dashboard.

The daemon is written in Golang, see the operations-software-purged repo.

CDN purge flow (MW to Kafka to Purged to Varnish/ATS).

Building the package

To build just the binary (not the Debian package) refer to the README.md file in the purged repository.

To target Debian Buster, build the package as follows on the build host:

WIKIMEDIA=yes BACKPORTS=yes ARCH=amd64 DIST=buster GIT_PBUILDER_AUTOCONF=no gbp buildpackage -jauto -us -uc -sa --git-builder=git-pbuilder

Similar build command can be issued for bullseye and bookworm .

During the bullseye -> bookworm transitioning we need to have the same purged version (as code) in the two different distribution releases. In this case the package versioning used is (eg.) 0.21+deb11u1 for Debian Bullseye (deb11u1) and 0.21+deb12u1 for Debian Bookworm (deb12u1).

This implies that if we don't use different tags or branches for git-buildpackage, every software change results in 2 different debian/changelog entries and 2 different package build/import into reprepro.

Alerts

The details about which pages need to be purged come from Kafka: for this reason we monitor the amount of time since the last Kafka message received and alert if it is not within a certain threshold. Here's how the alert looks like:

Time elapsed since the last kafka event processed by purged on cp2041 is CRITICAL: cluster=cache_text instance=cp2041 job=purged site=codfw topic={codfw.resource-purge,eqiad.resource-purge} https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Purged https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/purged?var-datasource=codfw+prometheus/ops&var-instance=cp2041

If this happens and nobody from Traffic is around to take a look, the best course of action is killing purged and checking the journal to see if it is being restarted properly by systemd:

$ sudo pkill -9 purged
$ sudo journalctl -u purged --since today
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Failed with result 'signal'.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Consumed 2d 16h 43min 48.527s CPU time.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Service RestartSec=100ms expired, scheduling restart.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 58.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: Stopped Purger for ATS and Varnish.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: purged.service: Consumed 2d 16h 43min 48.527s CPU time.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 systemd[1]: Started Purger for ATS and Varnish.
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 purged[44684]: 2020/06/29 08:57:05 Listening for topics eqiad.resource-purge,codfw.resource-purge
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 purged[44684]: 2020/06/29 08:57:05 Process purged started with 48 backend and 4 frontend workers. Metrics at :2112/metrics
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 purged[44684]: 2020/06/29 08:57:05 Start consuming topics [eqiad.resource-purge codfw.resource-purge] from kafka
Jun 29 08:57:05 cp2041 purged[44684]: 2020/06/29 08:57:05 Reading from 239.128.0.112,239.128.0.115 with maximum datagram size 4096


Gather information for bug reports

purged CPU profile diagram

If purged seems to be misbehaving, data such as perf reports, callgraphs and go profiling can be useful to diagnose the issue.

One minute of perf data can be gathered on the host where purged is running with:

sudo timeout 60 perf record -p `pidof purged`
sudo perf report --stdio

Similarly, go profile information can be collected with:

curl http://localhost:2112/debug/pprof/profile?seconds=60 > cpuprof

Copy the file cpuprof to a system with go installed, and run the following command to get a detail of CPU usage to standard output

go tool pprof -top cpuprof

A PNG profile diagram can be created with:

go tool pprof -png cpuprof

Operations

Restart purged service

Considering the purged daemon could be very resource intensive, especially when starting or when a lot of messages needs to be processed, is preferable to first depool the host if the purged.service needs to be restarted for any reason.

See also