Leo Hemsted 0ddebc63a8 reduce broadcast retry delay to 4 mins and drop prefetch. ...

### The facts

* Celery grabs up to 10 tasks from an SQS queue by default
* Each broadcast task takes a couple of seconds to execute, or double
  that if it has to go to the failover proxy
* Broadcast tasks delay retry exponentially, up to 300 seconds.
* Tasks are acknowledged when celery starts executing them.
* If a task is not acknowledged before its visibility timeout of 310
  seconds, sqs assumes the celery app has died, and puts it back on the
  queue.

### The situation

A task stuck in a retry loop was reaching its visbility timeout, and as
such SQS was duplicating it. We're unsure of the exact cause of reaching
its visibility timeout, but there were two contributing factors: The
celery prefetch and the delay of 300 seconds. Essentially, celery grabs
the task, keeps an eye on it locally while waiting for the delay ETA to
come round, then gives the task to a worker to do. However, that worker
might already have up to ten tasks that it's grabbed from SQS. This
means the worker only has 10 seconds to get through all those tasks and
start working on the delayed task, before SQS moves the task back into
available.

(Note that the delay of 300 seconds is translated into a timestamp based
on the time you called self.retry and put the task back on the queue.
Whereas the visibility timeout starts ticking from the time that a
celery worker picked up the task.)

### The fix

#### Set the max retry delay for broadcast tasks to 240 seconds

Setting the max delay to 240 seconds means that instead of a 10 second
buffer before the visibility timeout is tripped, we've got a 70 second
buffer.

#### Set the prefetch limit to 1 for broadcast workers

This means that each worker will have up to 1 currently executing task,
and 1 task pending execution. If it has these, it won't grab any more
off the queue, so they can sit there without their visibility timeout
ticking up.

Setting a prefetch limit to 1 will result in more queries to SQS and a
lower throughput. This might be relevant in, eg, sending emails. But the
broadcast worker is not hyper-time critical.

https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/3.1/getting-started/brokers/sqs.html?highlight=acknowledge#caveats
https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/3.1/userguide/optimizing.html?highlight=prefetch#reserve-one-task-at-a-time

2021-02-05 12:49:51 +00:00

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