Commit
This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.
colflow: prevent deadlocks when many queries spill to disk at same time
This commit fixes a long-standing issue which could cause memory-intensive queries to deadlock on acquiring the file descriptors quota when vectorized execution spills to disk. This bug has been present since the introduction of disk-spilling (over two and a half years ago, introduced in cockroachdb#45318 and partially mitigated in cockroachdb#45892), but we haven't seen this in any user reports, only in `tpch_concurrency` roachtest runs, so the severity seems pretty minor. Consider the following query plan: ``` Node 1 Node 2 TableReader TableReader | | HashRouter HashRouter | \ ___________ / | | \/__________ | | / \ | HashAggregator HashAggregator ``` and let's imagine that each hash aggregator has to spill to disk. This would require acquiring the file descriptors quota. Now, imagine that because of that hash aggregators' spilling, each of the hash routers has slow outputs causing them to spill too. As a result, this query plan can require `A + 2 * R` number of FDs of a single node to succeed where `A` is the quota for a single hash aggregator (equal to 16 - with the default value of `COCKROACH_VEC_MAX_OPEN_FDS` environment variable which is 256) and `R` is the quota for a single router output (2). This means that we can estimate that 20 FDs from each node are needed for the query to finish execution with 16 FDs being acquired first. Now imagine that this query is run with concurrency of 16. We can end up in such a situation that all hash aggregators have spilled, fully exhausting the global node limit on each node, so whenever the hash router outputs need to spill, they block forever since no FDs will ever be released, until a query is canceled or a node is shutdown. In other words, we have a deadlock. This commit fixes this situation by introducing a retry mechanism to exponentially backoff when trying to acquire the FD quota, until a time out. The randomizations provided by the `retry` package should be sufficient so that some of the queries succeed while others result in an error. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to prevent this deadlock from occurring in the first place without possible increase in latency in some case. The difficult thing is that we currently acquire FDs only once we need them, meaning once a particular component spills to disk. We could acquire the maximum number of FDs that a query might need up-front, before the query execution starts, but that could lead to starvation of the queries that ultimately won't spill to disk. This seems like a much worse impact than receiving timeout errors on some analytical queries when run with high concurrency. We're not an OLAP database, so this behavior seems ok. Release note (bug fix): Previously, CockroachDB could deadlock when evaluating analytical queries f multiple queries had to spill to disk at the same time. This is now fixed by making some of the queries error out instead.
- Loading branch information