Outsourced Clue

I posted this before on an old blog, thought I would repost it here:

Catchy title eh? I have decided that all of the issues of global warming can be attributed to programmers. Lazy programmers. “What is he talking about?” I hear shouted from the fourth row. I am talking about the extremely common mantra of “just throw hardware at the problem”. Instead of spending time to actually plan and optimize software, people throw up a quick piece of crap, and hope that it scales. When it doesn’t, they just buy bigger and more hardware. Problem solved.

I spoke about “How can see many people outgrow their data centers” before, this is really a follow up to that entry. The gist of it is that there is a LOT of electricity being wasted by half-ass solutions. This wasted electricity in turn releases carbon in the atmosphere, which causes global warming (this is of course a very watered down scientific analysis of global warming, but I am simple man that thinks in simple terms).

I was at the San Jose NANOG conference a few months ago, and sat in on a interesting panel titled Hot Time in the Big IDC: Power, cooling, and the data center. It was a round table discussion about what can be done about the severe lack of power and cooling that is affecting data centers around the world. This shortage affects their customers all too often (speaking from experience as well as talking to buddies who have similar challenges). It has become a nightmare to get sufficient power in data centers. Most will make you commit to a full cage if you need more breakers than are allocated for a single rack. Anyways, back to the panel. There were some pretty influential representatives from some large organizations, Cisco, Sun and Switch and Data (which purchased PAIX), to name a few. These individuals discussed some of the challenges facing IDC’s these days, and ways to solve them. The hardware people discussed how they are working to develop faster machines that draw less electricity and need less cooling. The data center/exchange people discussed some of their plans for bringing in more advanced cooling solutions. All of the topics were definitely paths they should take, but NO one touched on the most logical way to alleviate the problem. I wanted to stand up and yell “Hey Chuckos! If programmers and systems engineers just spent more time designing a proper system, then you would have AT LEAST a 50% reduction in cooling and capacity needs”. I say at least cause there is no hard numbers or facts I can point at to come up with a truly accurate number.

I can tell you from experience, I am amazed at some applications I have seen and how poorly they scale. Sometimes it’s as simple as slapping an index on column properly (I have seen an application that ran for years with the main sales report taking 4-5 minutes to run. A single index was placed on the proper column, and the time went down to 2 seconds. Larger database systems were purchased for this customer just so the system wouldn’t be “so slow”). This is an all too common issue that I know some of the more astute readers of this entry (if there are any readers of this entry) come across often.

So what do we do you ask? To help yourself and to help the world (give a man a fish and he eats for a day, show a man how to fish, and he eats forever or something like that), just sit down and think before your project starts where the bottlenecks could be, and how you can alleviate them. Then, understand how a computer and network actually work. Armed with this information, you should be able to design and develop a scalable system that doesn’t require 10 web servers, 5 database servers, and 5 application servers. And that my friends, would help save the world.

UPDATE: – Dan Prichett, from eBay, takes the discussion a step further.

Kudos to the fellas at Pingdom for gathering a page showing some pretty slick geek posters. My favorite is probably the CAIDA network map (I have one like that from back in 2001. Memories…).

View the Pingdom page.

By now you have read the many reports of The Planet’s data center fire. Long story short, there was an explosion on the first floor of their Houston facility (old ev1servers data center) that affected network connectivity, servers and a ton of other items. Some buddies of mine, Pelago, have their gear in this facility. Luckily, their servers were fine (no downtime), but there were spotty network issues for 3 days, starting on Sunday, that are finally resolver as of yesterday.

One item that caused me/us a ton of headaches was spotty connectivity to their payment processor. They utilize the SOAP interface for submitting their payment information (when someone signs up for their Intervals project management application etc.). What we were seeing is all connections to the SOAP service (accessed over normal HTTPS) timing out. After some digging, the weird part was they were only timing out when run via the PHP interpreter embedded in Apache (i.e. when run as part of the normal web process). If we ran it via the PHP command line interpreter, it worked fine. It was driving us mad, the network path to Sage looked fine using the normal network troubleshooting tools. In addition, we could do easily simulate pulling down the SOAP WSDL file using CURL etc. So it wasn’t network path related, but we still couldn’t figure it out.

On a hunch, I decided to watch the DNS traffic during the transaction, and low and behold, I saw DNS queries to theplanet’s recursive servers (which was odd as I always configure local caching servers), and it was querying for the AAAA (IPv6 DNS record) for the gateway, and timing out, resulting in multiple retransmissions. Now, when we ran the script via the command line, it would query the local caching servers (as it should) and get a NOERROR right away (the correct response since the payment processor didn’t have AAAA records), it would then fallback and query for the A record and succeed.

Here are the packet traces for those interested in the FAILURE scenario (names and IP’s changed to protected the non-innocent):

11:30:22.301692 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 34396, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 62) 1.2.3.4.47502 > 2.3.4.5.domain: [bad udp cksum de1d!] 20370+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net. (34)
11:30:27.302284 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 29396, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 62) 1.2.3.4.47501 > 2.3.4.5.domain: [bad udp cksum e11d!] 20370+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net. (34)
11:30:32.303732 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 34397, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 62) 1.2.3.4.47502 > 2.3.4.5.domain: [bad udp cksum de1d!] 20370+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net. (34)
11:30:37.304502 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 49399, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 79) 1.2.3.4.47502 > 2.3.4.5.domain: [bad udp cksum b9c4!] 38226+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net.longerdomain.com. (51)
11:30:42.305874 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 54400, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 79) 1.2.3.4.47503 > 2.3.4.5.domain: [bad udp cksum b6c4!] 38226+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net.longerdomain.com. (51)

You can see the retransmits. Now here is the CORRECT transaction:
05:30:54.793846 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 62) 1.2.3.4.50700 > 3.4.5.6.domain: [bad udp cksum d6dc!] 33819+ AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net. (34)
05:30:54.842103 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 17, length: 126) 3.4.5.6.domain > 1.2.3.4.50700: [udp sum ok] 33819 q: AAAA? endpoint.paymentprocessor.net. 0/1/0 ns: paymentprocessor.net. SOA ns.example.com. soacontact.example.com. 1064587759 4800 2400 950400 2400 (98)


The Planet’s recursive server was broken in the manner that it responded to queries for AAAA records. It just dropped them on the floor instead of returning a NOERROR. Now knowing why the system was timing out, I still couldn’t figure out why Apache was using The Planet’s recursive servers, which was causing the timeout problem, and not using the local caching servers (which worked fine). Knowing that some apps have some issues with caching the recursive servers, instead of querying /etc/resolv.conf each time, I restarted apache, tested the script again, and lo and behold, it started using the proper recursive servers.

What I think happened was, when Apache was first started, they were using The Planet’s recursive servers, then when it was switched in /etc/resolv.conf, Apache, having been up all this time (hundreds of days), never reconsulted the /etc/resolv.conf file for the new recursive IP’s, and continued to use the old ones. And when theplanet had their fire and all their problems, the script was using theplanet recursives, and would have connectivity problems. It was only Apache (and come to find out later, Postfix) that was having this issue. I still don’t know if it was the recursive being “broken” or that the recursive had trouble reaching the authoritative servers for paymentprocessor.com (made up name).  I would assume the former since I was able to retrieve the A record fine from the same authoritative server.

All in all, it was a frustrating three days (more so for my buddies than me).  The Planet has some serious accountability issues right now, that kind of downtime is not acceptable for an enterprise data center company.