Where's cacheboy been hiding?

I've had a few people ask where Cacheboy has been hiding since late 2009.

In short - I had a lack of reliable traffic nodes and my bachelor's degree to finish off.

Now, the long version.

The university reason is easy - I've been working on and off on a Bachelor of Arts for a few years, and decided late 2009 that I should just buckle down and get it all done. So I spent 2010 and the first part of 2011 studying (and working!) full-time. It was pretty intense. I had to put a few things on hold, and working on cacheboy was one of them.

The traffic node problem is more difficult. I had plenty of interest in running edge nodes in places like Australia, Italy and South Africa - where local connectivity is great, but international transit is not. But in order to run any useful amount of traffic from those nodes, I'll have to serve a lot of content to the network as a whole. This means "US" and "Western Europe".

I found myself in a catch-22 situation. I'd like to serve content across local IXes, but in order to do so, I first need to serve a lot more content to the US/Europe.

In order to do this, I'll need a few reliable nodes pushing at least a gigabit each. The last time I ran the numbers, more than 70% of traffic was destined to the US, UK and Germany.

So to properly push proper CDN of open source content, I'm going to need some donated nodes in the US that can source at least a gigabit. If I can't get that, the amount of traffic served to other destinations which could benefit from local traffic is .. well, it's really quite small.

So far, noone's stepped up to help with that.

More issues with Lighttpd

So occasionally Lighttpd on FreeBSD-7.x+ZFS gets all upset. I -think- there's something weird going on where I hit mbuf exhaustion somehow when ZFS starts taking a long time to complete IO requests; then all socket IO fails in Lighttpd until it is restarted.

More investigation is required. Well, more statistics are needed so I can make better judgements. Well, actually, more functional backends are needed so I can take one out of production when something like this occurs, properly debug what is going on and try to fix it.

Cacheboy Update / October/November 2009

Howdy,

Just a few updates this time around!

• Cacheboy was pushing around 800-1200mbit during the Firefox 3.5.4 release cycle. I started to hit issues with the backend server not keeping up with revalidating requests and so I'll have to improve the edge caching logic a little more.
• Lusca seems quite happy serving up 300-400mbit from a single node though; which is a big plus.
  
• I've found some quite horrible memory leaks in Quagga on only one of the edge nodes. I'll have to find some time to login and debug this a little more.
  
• The second backend server is now offically toast. I need to acquire another 1ru server with 2 SATA slots to magically appear in downtown Manhattan, NY.
  

Cacheboy downtime - hardware failures

Howdy,

I've had both backend servers fail today. One is throwing undervolt errors on one PSU line and is having disk issues (most likely related to an undervoltage); the other is just crashed.

I'm waiting for remote hands to prod the other box into life.

This is why I'd like some more donated equipment and hosting - I can make things much more fault tolerant. Hint hint.

My current wishlist

I'm going to put this on the website at some point, but I'm currently chasing a few things for Cacheboy:

• More US nodes. I'll take anything from 50mbit to 5gbit at this point. I need more US nodes to be able to handle enough aggregate traffic to make optimising the CDN content selection methods worthwhile.
• Some donations to cover my upcoming APNIC membership for ASN and IPv4/IPv6 space. This will run to about AUD $3500 this year and then around AUD $2500 a year after that.
• Some 1ru/2ru server hardware in the San Francisco area
• Another site or two willing to run a relatively low bandwidth "master" mirror site. I have one site in New York but I'd prefer to run a couple of others spread around Europe and the United States.

I'm sure more will come to mind as I build things out a little more.

New project - sugar labs!

I've just put the finishing touches on the basic sugar labs software repository. I'll hopefully be serving part or all of their software downloads shortly.

Sugar is the software behind the OLPC environment. It works on normal intel based PCs as far as I can tell. More information can be found at http://www.sugarlabs.org/

Cacheboy status update

So by and large, the pushing of bits is working quite well. I have a bunch of things to tidy up and a DNS backend to rewrite in C or C++ but that won't stop the bits from being pushed.

Unfortunately what I'm now lacking is US hosts to send traffic from. I still have more Europe and Asian connectivity than North American - and North America is absolutely where I need connectivity the most. Right now I'm only able to push 350-450 megabits of content from North America - and this puts a big, big limit on how much content I can serve overall.

Please contact me as soon as possible if you're interested in hosting a node in North America. I ideally need enough nodes to push between a gigabit and ten gigabits of traffic.

I will be able to start pushing noticable amounts of content out of regional areas once I've sorted out North America. This includes places like Australia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe. I'd love to be pushing more open source bits out of those locations to keep the transit use low but I just can't do so at the moment.

Canada node online and pushing bits!

The Canada/TORIX node is online thanks to John Nistor at prioritycolo in Toronto, Canada.

Thanks John!

BGP aware DNS

I've just written up the first "test" hack of BGP aware DNS.

The basic logic is simple but evil. I'm simply mapping BGP next-hop to a set of weighted servers. A server is then randomly chosen from this pool.

I'm not doing this for -all- prefixes and POPs - it is only being used for two specific POPs where there is a lot of peering and almost no transit. There are a few issues regarding split horizon BGP/DNS and request routing which I'd like to fully sort out before I enable it for everything. I don't want a quirk to temporarily redirect -all- requests to -one- server cluster!

In any case, the test is working well. I'm serving ~10mbit to WAIX (Western Australia) and ~ 30mbit to TORIX (Toronto, Canada.)

All of the DNS based redirection caveats apply - most certainly that not all client requests to the caches will also be over peering. I'll have to craft some method(s) of tracking this.

Updates - or why I've not been doing very much

G'day! Cacheboy has been running on autopilot for the last couple of months whilst I've been focusing on paid work and growing my little company. So far (mostly) so good there.

The main issue scaling traffic has been the range request handling in Squid/Lusca, so I've been working on fixing things up "just enough" to make it work in the firefox update environment. I think I've finally figured it out - and figured out the bugs in the range request handling in Squid too! - so I'll push out some updates to the network next week and throw it some more traffic.

I really am hoping to ramp traffic up past the gigabit mark once this is done. We'll just have to see!

VLC 1.0 released

VLC-1.0 has been released. The CDN is pushing out between 550 and 700mbit of VLC downloads. I'm sure it can do more but as I'm busy working elsewhere, I'm going to be overly conservative and leave the mirror weighting where it is.

Graphs to follow!

Current Downtime/issues

There's a current issue with content not being served correctly. It stemmed from a ZFS related panic on one of the backend servers (note to self - update to the very latest FreeBSD-7-stable code; these are all fixed!) which then came up with lighttpd but no ZFS mounts. Lighttpd then started returning 404's.

I'm now watching the backend(s) throw random connection failures and the Lusca caches then cache an error rather than the object.

I've fixed the backend giving trouble so it won't start up in that failed mode again and I've set the negative caching in the Lusca cache nodes to 30 seconds instead of the default 5 minutes. Hopefully the traffic levels now pick up to where its supposed to be.

EDIT: The problem is again related to the Firefox range requests and Squid/Lusca's inability to cache range request fragments.

The backend failure(s) removed the objects from the cache. The problem now is that the objects aren't re-entering the cache because they are all range requests.

I'm going to wind down the Firefox content serving for now until I get some time to hack up Lusca "enough" to cache the range request objects. I may just do something dodgy with the URL rewriter to force a full object request to occur in the background. Hm, actually..

New mirror node - italy

I've just turned on a new mirror node in Italy thanks to New Media Labs. They've provided some transit services and (I believe) 100mbit access to the local internet exchange.

Thanks guys!

And the GeoIP summary..

And the geoip summary:

From Sun Jun 7 00:00:00 2009 to Sun Jun 14 00:00:00 2009

Server	Country	MBytes	Requests
	us	5163783.09	6533162
	de	1514664.22	2307222
	ca	1152095.00	917777
	fr	948433.27	1451105
	uk	945640.71	1136455
	it	818161.03	770164
	br	542497.79	1426306
	se	482932.15	229559
	es	445444.34	647321
	pl	397755.30	1021083
	nl	373185.13	306023
	ru	368124.64	749924
	tr	293627.27	484965
	mx	276775.12	463252
	be	249088.62	213460
	ch	201782.33	209530
	ro	190059.45	274216
	fi	172399.75	204630
	ar	170421.77	374071
	no	169351.46	155258

A quick snapshot of Cacheboy destinations..

The following is a snapshot of the per destination AS traffic information I'm keeping.

If you're peering with any of these ASes and are willing to sponsor a cacheboy node or two then please let me know. How well I can scale things at this point is rapidly becoming limited to where I can push traffic from, rather than anything intrinsic to the software.

From Sun Jun 7 00:00:00 2009 to Sun Jun 14 00:00:00 2009

Time	Site	ASN	MBytes	Requests	% of overall
		AS3320	602465.01	1021975	3.26	DTAG Deutsche Telekom AG
		AS7132	583164.05	778259	3.16	SBIS-AS - AT&T Internet Services
		AS19262	459322.30	603127	2.49	VZGNI-TRANSIT - Verizon Internet Services Inc.
		AS3215	330962.95	553299	1.79	AS3215 France Telecom - Orange
		AS3269	317534.06	333114	1.72	ASN-IBSNAZ TELECOM ITALIA
		AS9121	259768.32	434932	1.41	TTNET TTnet Autonomous System
		AS22773	244573.65	283427	1.32	ASN-CXA-ALL-CCI-22773-RDC - Cox Communications Inc.
		AS12322	224708.25	343686	1.22	PROXAD AS for Proxad/Free ISP
		AS3352	206093.84	305183	1.12	TELEFONICADATA-ESPANA Internet Access Network of TDE
		AS812	204120.74	166633	1.10	ROGERS-CABLE - Rogers Cable Communications Inc.
		AS8151	198918.22	328632	1.08	Uninet S.A. de C.V.
		AS6327	197906.53	152861	1.07	SHAW - Shaw Communications Inc.
		AS3209	191429.18	303787	1.04	ARCOR-AS Arcor IP-Network
		AS20115	182407.09	225151	0.99	CHARTER-NET-HKY-NC - Charter Communications
		AS2119	181719.20	117656	0.98	TELENOR-NEXTEL T.net
		AS577	181167.02	152383	0.98	BACOM - Bell Canada
		AS12874	172973.42	108429	0.94	FASTWEB Fastweb Autonomous System
		AS6389	165445.73	236133	0.90	BELLSOUTH-NET-BLK - BellSouth.net Inc.
		AS6128	165183.07	210300	0.89	CABLE-NET-1 - Cablevision Systems Corp.
		AS2856	164332.96	219267	0.89	BT-UK-AS BTnet UK Regional network

Query content served: 5234195.61 mbytes; 6878234 requests (ie, what was displayed in the table.)

Total content served: 18473721.25 mbytes; 26272660 requests (ie, the total amount of content served over the time period.)

Seeking a few more US / Canada hosts

G'day everyone!

I'm now actively looking for some more Cacheboy CDN nodes in the United States and Canada. I've got around 3gbit of available bandwidth in Europe, 1gbit of available bandwidth in Japan but only 300mbit of available bandwidth in North America.

I'd really, really appreciate a couple of well-connected North American nodes so I can properly test the platform and software that I'm building. The majority of traffic is still North American in destination; I'm having to serve a fraction of it from Sweden and the United Kingdom at the moment. Erk.

Please drop me a line if you're interested. The node requirements are at http://www.cacheboy.net/node_requirements.html . Thankyou!

Another day, another firefox release done..

The June Firefox 3.0.11 release rush is all but over and Cacheboy worked without much of a problem.

The changes I've made to the Lusca load shedding code (ie, being able to disable it :) works well for this workload. Migrating the backend to lighttpd (and fixing up the ETag generation to be properly consistent between 32 bit and 64 bit platforms) fixed the initial issues I was seeing.

The network pushed out around 850mbit at peak. Not a lot (heck, I can do that on one CPU of a mid-range server without a problem!) but it was a good enough test to show that things are working.

I need to teach Lusca a couple of new tricks, namely:

• It needs to be taught to download at the fastest client speed, not the slowest; and
• 
  
• Some better range request caching needs to be added.

The former isn't too difficult - that is a weekend 5 line patch. The latter is more difficult. I don't really want to shoehorn in range request caching into the current storage layer. It would look a lot like how Vary and Etag is currently handled (ie, with "magical" store entries acting as indexes to the real backend objects.) I'd rather put in a dirtier hack that is easy to undo now and use the opportunity to tidy up the whole storage layer a whole lot. But the "tidying up" rant is not for this blog entry, its for the Lusca development blog.

The hack will most likely be a little logic to start downloading full objects that aren't in the cache when their first range request comes in - so subsequent range requests for those objects will be "glued" to the current request. It means that subsequent requests will "stall" until enough of the object is transferred to start satisfying their range request. The alternative is to pass through each range request to a backend until the full object is transferred and this would improve initial performance but there's a point where the backend could be overloaded with too many range requests for highly popular objects and that starts affecting how fast full objects are transferred.

As a side note, I should probably do up some math on a whiteboard here and see if I can model some of the potential behaviour(s). It would certainly be a good excuse to brush up on higher math clue. Hm..!

Migrating to Lighttpd on the backend, and why aren't my files being cached..

I migrated away from apache-1.3 to Lighttpd-1.4.19 to handle the load better. Apache-1.3 handles lots of concurrent disk IO on large files fine but it bites for lots of concurrent network connections.

In theory, once all of the caching stuff is fixed, the backends will spend most of their time revalidating objects.

But for some weird reason I'm seeing TCP_REFRESH_MISS on my Lusca edge nodes and generally poor performance during this release. I look at the logs and find this:

[Host: mozilla.cdn.cacheboy.net\r\n
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10\r\n
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\n
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\n
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:09:39 GMT\r\n
If-None-Match: "1721454571"\r\n
Cache-Control: max-stale=0\r\n
Connection: Keep-Alive\r\n
Pragma: no-cache\r\n
X-BlueCoat-Via: 24C3C50D45B23509\r\n]

[HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n
Content-Type: application/octet-stream\r\n
Accept-Ranges: bytes\r\n
ETag: "1687308715"\r\n
Last-Modified: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:09:39 GMT\r\n
Content-Length: 2178196\r\n
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:25:40 GMT\r\n
Server: lighttpd/1.4.19\r\n
X-Cache: MISS from mirror1.jp.cacheboy.net\r\n
Via: 1.0 mirror1.jp.cacheboy.net:80 (Lusca/LUSCA_HEAD)\r\n
Connection: keep-alive\r\n\r]

Notice the different ETags? Hm! I wonder whats going on. On a hunch I checked the Etags from both backends. master1 for that object gives "1721454571"; master2 gives "1687308715". They both have the same size and same timestamp. I wonder what is different?

Time to go digging into the depths of the lighttpd code.

EDIT: the etag generation is configurable. By default it uses the mtime, inode and filesize. Disabling inode and inode/mtime didn't help. I then found that earlier lighttpd versions have different etag generation behaviour based on 32 or 64 bit platforms. I'll build a local lighttpd package and see if I can replicate the behaviour on my 32/64 bit systems. Grr.

Meanwhile, Cacheboy isn't really serving any of the mozilla updates. :(

EDIT: so it turns out the bug is in the ETag generation code. They create an unsigned 32-bit integer hash value from the etag contents, then shovel it into a signed long for the ETag header. Unfortunately for FreeBSD-i386, "long" is a signed 32 bit type, and thus things go airy from time to time. Grrrrrr.

EDIT: fixed in a newly-built local lighttpd package; both backend servers are now doing the right thing. I'm going back to serving content.

New mirrors - mirror2.uk and mirror3.uk

I've just had two new sponsors show up with a pair of UK mirrors.

mirror2.uk is thanks to UK Broadband, who have graciously given me access to a few hundred megabits of traffic and space on an ESX server.

mirror3.uk (due to be turned up today!) is thanks to a private donor named Alex who has given me a server in his colocation space and up to a gigabit of traffic.

Shiny! Thanks to you both.

More traffic!

970mbit and rising...!