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Load balancing at a connection level

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
kubernetes, python
Domain
api, backend, distributed-systems, networking

Research direction

Start with the Python entry point riva.client.ASRService(auth) and the Kubernetes Deployment and Service definitions included in the report. Determine whether the client reuses connections and whether that explains the observed pod imbalance; done means documenting a confirmed cause or the missing evidence needed to reproduce it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have an application with two pods and some client from inside the same cluster connecting to them by a service, as far as I know this will do a connection level multiplexing.

There is no reason for the workload to be consistently higher at one pod than another, yet I can see one of the pods receiving nearly 3 times more load than the other over a period of 3 hours.

image

The pod with more load was already running when the other pod started.

My first hypothesis was session stickiness, but a quick test shows that the connections are balanced

for _ in `seq 300` ; 
do
   curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -s riva-api.riva:8002/metrics | grep '^nv_gpu_utilization'; 
   sleep 0.1; 
done | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c

My new hypothesis is that python riva client is reusing the connections. Does that make sense or we are guaranteed to start a new connection when calling riva.client.ASRService(auth)?

Here you can find some snippets of the configuration

riva-api (pod) partial definition

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: riva-api
  namespace: riva
  labels:
    app: riva-api
    release: riva-api
spec:
  replicas: 2
  strategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 1
      maxUnavailable: 0
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: riva-api
      release: riva-api
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: riva-api
        release: riva-api
    ...
    spec:
      ...
      containers:
        - name: riva-api
          image: nvcr.io/nvidia/riva/riva-speech:2.14.0
          ...

riva-api-online definition

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: riva-api
  namespace: riva
spec:
  ports:
      ...
  selector:
    app: riva-api
    release: riva-api
Dominant language
Python
Stars
142
Forks
52
No merged PRs in 30d

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