This removes some code which is duplicative and obscure (ie it’s not
very clear why we do `"a" * 73` even though there is a Very Good Reason
for doing so).
This is easier to read than having to understand the arguments 1…n of
the cache decorator are ‘magic’, and gives us more flexibility about
how the cache keys are formatted, eg being able to add words in the
middle of them.
Also changes the key format for all templates to be
`service-{service_id}-templates` instead of `templates-{service_id}`
because then it’s clearer what the ID represents.
`@cache.delete('user', 'user_id')` is easier to read and understand than
`@cache.delete('user', key_from_args=[1])`. This will become even more
apparent if we have to start doing stuff like `key_from_args=[1, 5]`,
which is a lot more opaque than just saying
`'service_id', 'template_id'`.
It does make the implementation a bit more complex, but I’m not too
worried about that because:
- the tests are solid
- it’s nicely encapsulated
Most of the time spent by the admin app to generate a page is spent
waiting for the API. This is slow for three reasons:
1. Talking to the API means going out to the internet, then through
nginx, the Flask app, SQLAlchemy, down to the database, and then
serialising the result to JSON and making it into a HTTP response
2. Each call to the API is synchronous, therefore if a page needs 3 API
calls to render then the second API call won’t be made until the
first has finished, and the third won’t start until the second has
finished
3. Every request for a service page in the admin app makes a minimum
of two requests to the API (`GET /service/…` and `GET /user/…`)
Hitting the database will always be the slowest part of an app like
Notify. But this slowness is exacerbated by 2. and 3. Conversely every
speedup made to 1. is multiplied by 2. and 3.
So this pull request aims to make 1. a _lot_ faster by taking nginx,
Flask, SQLAlchemy and the database out of the equation. It replaces them
with Redis, which as an in-memory key/value store is a lot faster than
Postgres. There is still the overhead of going across the network to
talk to Redis, but the net improvement is vast.
This commit only caches the `GET /service` response, but is written in
such a way that we can easily expand to caching other responses down the
line.
The tradeoff here is that our code is more complex, and we risk
introducing edge cases where a cache becomes stale. The mitigations
against this are:
- invalidating all caches after 24h so a stale cache doesn’t remain
around indefinitely
- being careful when we add new stuff to the service response
---
Some indicative numbers, based on:
- `GET http://localhost:6012/services/<service_id>/template/<template_id>`
- with the admin app running locally
- talking to Redis running locally
- also talking to the API running locally, itself talking to a local
Postgres instance
- times measured with Chrome web inspector, average of 10 requests
╲ | No cache | Cache service | Cache service and user | Cache service, user and template
-- | -- | -- | -- | --
**Request time** | 136ms | 97ms | 73ms | 37ms
**Improvement** | 0% | 41% | 88% | 265%
---
Estimates of how much storage this requires:
- Services: 1,942 on production × 2kb = 4Mb
- Users: 4,534 on production × 2kb = 9Mb
- Templates: 7,079 on production × 4kb = 28Mb
Currently requests to the API made from the admin app are going from
PaaS admin app to the nginx router ELB, which then routes them back
to the api app on PaaS.
This makes sense for external requests, but for requests made from
the admin app we could skip nginx and go directly to the api PaaS
host, which should reduce load on the nginx instances and
potentially reduce latency of the api requests.
API apps on PaaS are checking the X-Custom-Forwarder header (which
is set by nginx on proxy_pass requests) to only allow requests going
through the proxy.
This adds the custom header to the API client requests, so that they
can pass that header check without going through nginx.
Done using isort[1], with the following command:
```
isort -rc ./app ./tests
```
Adds linting to the `run_tests.sh` script to stop badly-sorted imports
getting re-introduced.
Chosen style is ‘Vertical Hanging Indent’ with trailing commas, because
I think it gives the cleanest diffs, eg:
```
from third_party import (
lib1,
lib2,
lib3,
lib4,
)
```
1. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/isort
