• Dylan Griffith's avatar
    Set 1s server side timeout on Elasticsearch counts · a893b326
    Dylan Griffith authored
    These count requests are loaded one per tab every time the search page
    loads. This means a single search for one type of document will trigger
    up to 7 other searches just to get the counts for the other tabs.
    
    These tab counts are often incredibly expensive requests too especially
    relative to the cheaper searches. For example an issue search may take
    1s while a blobs count will take 30s. Due to a limited thread pool on
    the Elasticsearch side we regularly see these count queries being the
    cause of queuing which is slowing down otherwise fast searches on
    GitLab.com.
    
    As such we want to set a timeout on these. This timeout is just a
    server side Elasticsearch timeout for now which is a soft limit because
    Elasticsearch is asynchronous and it may actually take Elasticsearch
    longer to realise it's timed out and cancel the query. As such we may
    see searches take a few seconds before they timeout even though the
    timeout is 1s. This is not perfect but benchmarking in the related issue
    shows this still can drastically improve throughput and this is one of
    the easiest steps to take now.
    
    One thing to also note about this approach is that users will still see
    a count in the event of a timeout. The count may be a partial count and
    actually lower than the true count. If they switch to the tab they will
    see a true count. I think this is probably still better than displaying
    nothing since the main value the tab counts have is showing whether or
    not there are searches on that tab at all.
    
    Later we may wish to introduce client side timeouts on our ES client but
    it's trickier to accomplish since we use a single client configuration
    which has a global timeout for all Elasticsearch queries. Additionally
    client side timeouts will result in errors that we may wish to handle
    specially to show some indicator on the tab.
    
    Read more at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/301146
    a893b326
301146-1s-server-side-timeouts-on-elasticsearch-counts.yml 109 Bytes