Nodejs-pubsub: Slamming Pub/Sub with publishJSON requests yields google-gax timeout errors

[willbattel]

I've noticed numerous other related issues, but followed the recommendation here https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-pubsub/issues/770#issuecomment-544013584 to post a new issue in isolation for posterity, just in case.

Environment details

• OS: Google App Engine Standard
• Node.js version: ^10
• npm version: N/A
• @google-cloud/pubsub version: 1.5.0

Steps to reproduce

We have a utility service, run only occasionally on demand of our data science team, where we are streaming documents from Firestore, and publishing each document received to a Pub/Sub topic in a different GCP project. The first few thousand messages are published without issue, but at some arbitrary point, about 100 seconds into slamming Pub/Sub with these requests, we repeatedly encounter the following error, after which the App Engine instance is unrecoverable.

Error: Retry total timeout exceeded before any response was received 
    at repeat (/srv/node_modules/@google-cloud/pubsub/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:65:31) 
    at Timeout.setTimeout [as _onTimeout] (/srv/node_modules/@google-cloud/pubsub/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:100:25) 
    at ontimeout (timers.js:436:11) 
    at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:300:5) 
    at listOnTimeout (timers.js:263:5) 
    at Timer.processTimers (timers.js:223:10) code: 4 } } reason: { Error: Retry total timeout exceeded before any response was received 
  at repeat (/srv/node_modules/@google-cloud/pubsub/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:65:31) 
  at Timeout.setTimeout [as _onTimeout] (/srv/node_modules/@google-cloud/pubsub/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:100:25) 
  at ontimeout (timers.js:436:11) 
  at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:300:5) 
  at listOnTimeout (timers.js:263:5) 
  at Timer.processTimers (timers.js:223:10) code: 4

I have simplified+obfuscated our code below.

'use strict'

const express = require('express')

const { Firestore } = require('@google-cloud/firestore')
const { PubSub } = require('@google-cloud/pubsub')

const firestore = new Firestore()
const pubsub = new PubSub()

const app = express()

app.get("/", (req, res) => {
    const promises = []
    firestore.collection("someCollection").stream().on('data', (doc) => {
        const promise = new Promise(async (resolve, reject) => {

            // ...
            // data validation/sanitation
            // ...

            pubsub.topic('projects/some-project/topics/some-topic').publishJSON({
                fieldA: data.fieldA,
                fieldB: data.fieldB,
                fieldC: data.fieldC
            }, {
                foo: doc.id,
                bar: 'baz'
            }, (error, messageId) => {
                if (error || !messageId) { reject(error) }
                else resolve(messageId)
            })

        })

        promises.push(promise)
    }).on('end', () => {
        console.log("Received all documents.")

        Promise.all(promises)
        .catch((error) => {
            console.error(`Failed to publish one or more messages. ${JSON.stringify(error, null, 4)}`)
        })
        .finally(() => {
            console.log("Finished dumping collection.")
            res.status(200).send('OK').end()
        })
    })
})

// Start the server
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 8080
app.listen(PORT, () => {
    console.log(`App listening on port ${PORT}`)
})

module.exports = app

Additionally, here is our package.json dependency list including dependencies used but not shown in above code.

"@google-cloud/firestore": "3.5.0",
"@google-cloud/pubsub": "1.5.0",
"@google-cloud/storage": "4.3.1",
"express": "4.17.1",
"lodash": "4.17.15"

Please let me know if I can provide further information useful for finding the problem+solution. Thanks!

[feywind]

@willbattel Thanks for posting this! I'm going to link this to the meta-issue I've been building in regards to things that be grpc-js issues. I don't guess you've tried with the C++ bindings?

[willbattel]

@feywind just tried it now. Following the grpc technique shown here https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-pubsub/issues/770#issuecomment-541226361, we're curiously getting the same error in Stackdriver but the process survives noticeably longer (4 minutes) before tripping over itself and dying.

Looking at the Pub/Sub console, it seems significantly more messages did get published than before changing to grpc. Looks like at least twice as many messages were successfully sent than before. The console shows a max Publish message request count of 85.68/second before it died, which is the highest we've ever seen it get to.

EDIT: Running it again yielded a different error- not sure what happened the first time but here is the stack trace when using grpc

Error: 4 DEADLINE_EXCEEDED: Deadline exceeded 
    at Object.callErrorFromStatus (/srv/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/call.js:30:26) 
    at Http2CallStream.call.on (/srv/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/client.js:96:33) 
    at Http2CallStream.emit (events.js:203:15) 
    at process.nextTick (/srv/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/call-stream.js:100:22) 
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:61:11) 
  code: 4, 
  details: 'Deadline exceeded', 
  metadata: Metadata { internalRepr: Map {}, options: {} }

[willbattel]

@feywind upon further inspection, it looks like almost all, if not all, documents did get sent over to the receiving subscriber. I'm still not sure why we see the errors in Stackdriver (see EDIT in previous comment), but if those errors hadn't appeared it would have seemed to work without issue when using grpc. We got about 3,000 of those errors, and about 35,000 documents were streamed from Firestore.

[feywind]

Going through the issue list again here. Is this something that's still going on for you? If so, I can see if someone on the grpc team has any ideas.

[willbattel]

I believe so, but let me take a closer look again this weekend and get back to you with more specifics.

[lukelove]

I am receiving this message now simply doing one call with .publishJSON

Error: Retry total timeout exceeded before any response was received
    at repeat (/srv/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:65:31)
    at Timeout.setTimeout [as _onTimeout] (/srv/node_modules/google-gax/build/src/normalCalls/retries.js:100:25)
    at ontimeout (timers.js:498:11)
    at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:323:5)
    at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:290:5) code: 4 } my_topic {"my": "data"}" 

[feywind]

Can anyone who's had this problem go ahead and try it with the latest pubsub library version? I notice that gRPC C++ was mentioned above, grpc-js has seen a lot of stability improvements.

I'm going to see if someone who handles google-gax can look.

[willbattel]

@feywind I'll revisit this as soon as I can- likely the week after next.

[sameerRsystems]

I am also facing same problem. Did you guys found fix?

[lukelove]

I ended up using Python which doesn't have the problem

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 8:12 PM Sameer Verma [e-mail]
wrote:

I am also facing same problem. Did you guys found fix?

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[feywind]

As of 2.5.0, we're explicitly pulling in a new gax (and grpc-js) here. Did anyone see any improvement from that? There was also a microgenerator bug having to do with batching support.

[willbattel]

We're not currently using the program that produced the errors, so I cannot comment on any improvements unfortunately. If we do restore that service I'll take a look.

In any case, thanks for looking into this!

[feywind]

It kind of sounds like everyone who was having problems has moved off to other solutions. That's a bummer, but also I'm glad you're not blocked! If anyone still ends up needing help or has more comments on it, please feel free to re-open.