Refactor tail-sampling processor - Decision cache

[jpkrohling]

The decision cache can be a regular cached, where the key is the trace ID and the value is the decision. We can use a ring buffer to limit the number of entries in this cache, but this can be an implementation detail. Whenever a new span arrives, we'd run it through the cache and immediately release/drop based on a previous decision.

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[kentquirk]

Drop decisions only need a single bit -- "we dropped this", so there's benefit to splitting the decision cache into a Bloom or Cuckoo filter for drops and a separate cache for keep (attaching metadata to spans like sampling probability may require the keep cache to be more than a filter).

Cache size should be configurable.

[djluck]

@kentquirk can you elaborate a bit more on why we'd need to capture sampling probability per-trace? My understanding is that by entering a trace id into the "sampled" cache we're stating that all spans for this trace should be sampled.

[jpkrohling]

@kentquirk, do you want to work on this one? I can assign this to you. I'd like to work on converting the metrics to use OTel, which could be helpful in adding observability to the cache.

[kentquirk]

@djluck You're correct that the probability applies to all spans in a trace, but sampling probability / adjusted count is of interest when analyzing the results. When I see a trace I want to know "how many traces like this occurred?" For a simple example, if I normally sample at 10% but keep all errors, I need to be able to multiply non-error traces by 10 in order to calculate the appropriate fraction of errors. To do that, I need to know what the sampling probability was. That data needs to be attached to the outgoing spans.

@jpkrohling You can assign it to me. It might end up getting split into a couple of pieces.

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[jamesmoessis]

Hi @kentquirk @jpkrohling this is certainly something I think this processor could use, and would help with early sampling decisions and preventing many spans from being stored in memory for longer than needed.

The discussions around bloom/cuckoo filter are definitely on the right track. Looking through Refinery's code, it uses a dual cuckoo-filter mechanism which seems to be quite memory efficient and relatively low rate of false-positives.

Another possible implementation is using an LRU cache. To make it twice as memory efficient you could also just store the right half of the trace id as a uint64.

As my team is in the midst of implementing tail sampling at quite a large scale, I'd be interested in taking a look at this in the coming weeks.

[jpkrohling]

I would prefer if someone from Honeycomb could implement the cuckoo filter, to prevent any misunderstandings on the code ending up similar to Refinery's, and while I thought LRU would be the optimal one except for the size, your suggestion of using only the right-half of the IDs is wonderful!

[jpkrohling]

For now, I'll implement the cache as a circular buffer, and we can have alternative implementations right after that.

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