[5.x] Adding scaling to balance = false

[dbpolito]

This introduces a new strategy for balance: single

What this does is, it still has scaling similar to auto, but instead of having one worker per queue, it still keeps all queues into the same process, following the order specified, similar to what you would have using queue:work --queue=a,b,c

TBH this was the behavior i expected when i started using horizon a long time ago...

I'm using it in my project and thought it would be useful for others...

I can open a PR on the Docs in case this gets accepted / merged.

Maybe the name isn't that clear, totally open to change.

[fabriciojs]

👍🏻 this is nice, as this way we don't get bloated with too many workers, but we can still make our queues more granular for straight visibility into each of them.

[taylorotwell]

What is the main difference between this and 'balance' => false?

[dbpolito]

Well, off won't auto scale, right? It will basically stick with the process or max process... This will scale based on the jobs, but each worker will have all queues, so it will scale up to x and each worker with queue=a,b,c

[taylorotwell]

Gotcha. I do wonder if we really need a new strategy for this if off behaves similar to this but just using maxProcesses. You have to build your server to be able to handle your queue worker load at maxProcesses anyways so why not just let it run at max all the time using the off strategy?

[dbpolito]

Well while this is true, there are several benefits of not spending the memory just to run the workers unnecessarily:

1. Reserving all this memory just to keep seeking for jobs (~100mb per worker)
2. Having more free memory for the jobs to process
3. Scaling Horizon Instances on K8S based on resources usage

Also this brings the functionality of queue priority, so it needs to process on the order.

I think the complexity added vs functionality might worth to more people.

I'm already using this strategy on my project and only changing to it reduced 30% of memory usage in my case... Of course it will change depending on how your queues are designed.

---

Another thing that would help on this matter which was discussed on other issues is starting workers on min instead of max, to avoid unnecessary memory peak / waste.

[taylorotwell]

Should this just be the default behavior of balance => false? I don't think the name single really conveys much.

[dbpolito]

Well, that is what i expected to be TBH... i agree, but isn't it a "BREAKING CHANGE"? Won't break anything but will change the behavior for everyone who uses it.

I'm totally ok with that, or come up with a different name...

[taylorotwell]

I'm not sure if it's a breaking change. We never actually document the scaling behavior of balance => false and it shouldn't "break" your application as it's mainly an internal optimization for Horizon.

[dbpolito]

well makes sense... i will try to change the PR later today or tomorrow tops.

[taylorotwell]

Thanks! Just mark as ready for review when you want me to take another look.

[dbpolito]

@taylorotwell updated 👍

[taylorotwell]

Thanks

[ChristopheBorcard]

It might have been wise to rename the PR.

Because now the change log on the Tag is talking about a new Single balance strategy that doesn't exist:

https://github.com/laravel/horizon/releases/tag/v5.26.0

[dbpolito]

I renamed the PR but it won't update the release i think

[driesvints]

I updated all references. Thanks

[vilhelmjosander]

A bit late to the party here but this seems to have broken my use of Horizon with balance = false.

I have a fairly large application which sometimes handles upwards of 200k jobs per hour on a single VPS. After updating Horizon to >= 5.26.0 it suddenly stopped processing jobs (or processed them EXTREMELY slow). Downgrading to 5.25.0 and everything is back to normal again.

This is my setup:

 'environments' => [
        'production' => [
            'supervisor-live' => [
                'connection' => 'redis-live-battles',
                'queue' => ['live'],
                'balance' => 'false',
                'minProcesses' => 1,
                'maxProcesses' => 5,
                'balanceMaxShift' => 15,
                'balanceCooldown' => 1,
                'tries' => 3,
                'timeout' => 80,
            ],
            'supervisor-default' => [
                'connection' => 'redis',
                'queue' => ['urgent', 'high', 'default', 'low'],
                'balance' => 'false',
                'minProcesses' => 1,
                'maxProcesses' => 50,
                'balanceMaxShift' => 15,
                'balanceCooldown' => 1,
                'tries' => 3,
                'timeout' => 80,
            ],
        ],

Unfortunately I am not familiar enough with the internals of Horizon to be able to debug this myself but i've narrowed it down to this PR.

This is what my horizon dashboard looks like after deploying >= 5.26.0. Basically jobs just keep piling up without being processed across the different queues.

[dbpolito]

@vilhelmjosander

Well, i also got a fairly big project and haven't noticed any difference on performance, processing ~15k jobs as usual...

Did you check the job throughput? Is that different on versions?

TBH i can't see a reason to impact performance, the only behavior difference is that it scales now... before it would always be at 50 process in your case... now it will scale from 1 to 50... but the way it process and how it process is exactly the same.

Looking at your screenshot, it seems it scaled properly and it's using 50 processes...

I would look at the job throughput / runtime... as maybe the jobs may be different.

[trevorgehman]

Just to add another comment. This affected our Horizon workers because we had an old config file where only processes was specified, instead of minProcesses and maxProcesses. Here is our config:

'supervisor-1' => [
    'connection' => 'redis',
    'queue' => ['critical'],
    'balance' => false,
    'processes' => 6,
    'tries' => 10,
    'sleep' => 2,
    'timeout' => 3500,
    'memory' => 1500,
    'maxJobs' => 1000,
],

Horizon treats processes as maxProcesses. And since we didn't have a value minProcesses it defaulted to 1.

https://github.com/laravel/horizon/blob/4d021d2adef966433b018ff67c718ceab7209076/src/ProvisioningPlan.php#L174

So basically it enabled scaling for all these workers which previously didn't scale.

It didn't break anything for us, just took us a couple weeks to notice that our queues processing jobs a bit slower.

[sts-ryan-holton]

Just jumping in here, I tried out setting 'balance' => false for my supervisors in my Horizon config, not completely sure what the benefit here would be? Does this technically mean it processes each queue synchronously, so each queue in order first? What's the benefits?

[vilhelmjosander]

I'm at a loss at what to do here. As soon as I upgrade to >= 5.26.0 horizon basically stops processing jobs with balance = false. It works flawlessly with 5.25.0.

Currently this also stops me from updating laravel/framework since horizon 5.25.0 gives the following errors with Laravel >= 11.27.0:

Declaration of Laravel\Horizon\RedisQueue::pop must be compatible with Illuminate\Queue\RedisQueue::pop.

Any ideas? :)

[sts-ryan-holton]

@vilhelmjosander A few things to consider:

1. Not sure if it's causing you a problem, but it should be 'balance' => false instead of 'balance' => 'false'. From your screenshot, your "Balancing" column says "False", but when I use 'balance' => false (note the boolean not string) then under "Balancing" it'll say "Disabled", so check this
2. After looking at your screenshot, your queues, urgent, high, default and low in that order, I'm pretty sure it'll try to process everything on the urgent queue first, then move on to the high queue, then default, then low. This actually means that, if for example you have a tonne of jobs coming in on the urgent queue, or high queue, then any queue later on simply will just build up and never really process anything unless you allocate more workers/processes.

I noticed this in my own platform, to try to illustrate it better, if you have 5 workers and each job takes 1 second and you have new jobs filling the urgent queue as quick as they're being processed, no queues below it will have enough workers.

Does this help?

[dbpolito]

@vilhelmjosander it's hard to help without a way to reproduce...

I tried to reproduce here... played with the tests, and everything seems to be working as it should...

Can you check the processes that are running? with ps aux or something like that, to check how all those 50 processes looks? You should have 50 processes with ... --queue="urgent,high,default,low" ...

And again, are you sure it's not processing? Because as stated above, it will process on this queue order... so all urgent first, then high, then default, then low...

None of the queues are processed? or only the urgent ones?

Of course we need to fix it, if something is wrong... but have you tried changing the balance? Maybe for your use case you do need to change to simple or auto

[vilhelmjosander]

@dbpolito

At once after deploying >= 5.26.0 it starts to process the queues extremely slow. I now tried to change the setting to false (boolean) instead of the string 'false' (which works fine on 5.25.0).

This is the only thing I see which is related to horizon with ps aux. Same for ps aux | grep queue or similar. I do not have 50 processes (which I do have with 5.25.0).

I did note that after deploying >= 5.26.0 ps aux did show 20-50 processes with ... --queue="urgent,high,default,low" ... for a while, then it stopped and no processes at all were visible which basically meant that jobs were not processed.

Here is my current config:

Switching to balance = 'auto' seems to work. The reason why I've had balance = false is that I do want the default laravel behaviour where the jobs are processed in the queue order. It is important that the urgent queue has higher priority than the low queue and always processes asap.

[dbpolito]

@vilhelmjosander

the only thing i noticed which shouldn't impact anything, but who knows... is these supervisors uses different redis connections...

so when you run it you only have the supervisor processes running, and no actual worker running? that's weird... as horizon doesn't support scaling to 0 workers...

are you sure nothing pops into your logs? errors or anything?

Really hard to help, i tried changing tests, trying to reproduce but not a lot of luck.

Maybe you can setup a reproducible repo so we can jump in