Last week was hack week at Dropbox. I took the opportunity to explore the implementation of a GraphQL server that does optimal IO batching and concurrency.

Serial IO

A common performance problem in the implementation of web services is serial IO. Let's say you have a service that returns the names of all of your friends. It's easy and natural to implement it like this:

me = fetch_user_info(my_user_id) friend_names = [] for friend_id in me.friends: friend_names.append(fetch_user_info(friend_id).name) return friend_names

The problem is that each user info lookup for my friends occurs sequentially. Even with TCP connection pooling, that's still a packet round-trip in the datacenter. "But that should be faster than 10 ms right?" Even if it is, it doesn't take many friends to blow your performance budget and send your response time across the threshold of perceptible delay.

Moreover, this problem compounds on itself. If your inner functions have serial IO and you call them in a loop, you've just added potentially thousands of round-trips to your backend data sources. I would hazard a guess and say serial IO is the largest contributor to service response latencies.

Manually Batched IO

One solution is to always batch IO. Every function takes a list and returns a list. This can be made to work (indeed, I've achieved excellent performance by carefully, manually, batching) but doesn't compose as your services scale. Sometimes it's just too hard to know all of the data you will need to fetch, and the dependencies between that data.

OK, so serial IO is bad. More on that in a bit. Let's talk about REST now.

REST

At IMVU, we went all-in on REST, building a rather substantial framework to make it easy to create REST services. We anticipated the fact that REST services tend to require many round-trips from clients, so we built a response denormalization system, where the service can anticipate the other services a client will need to hit and include their responses too.

This sounded great at first, and in fact was mostly an improvement from the prior state of affairs. But, at scale, REST has some challenging performance problems. For one, REST services have a defined schema, and they always return the data they advertise. As I mentioned, if a service doesn't return all the data a client needs, the client needs to hit more services, increasing the number of client-to-server round-trips. In addition, because the service always returns the same set of data, it must query the backend database to fetch more data than the client even cares about.

This phenomenon tends to happen most frequently with core domain objects like users. Because users are so important, they accumulate relationships with so many pieces of data (e.g. list of subscribed experiments, contact lists, shopping carts, etc.), almost all of which is irrelevant to most clients.

Why GraphQL?

This is where GraphQL comes in. In GraphQL, the client specifies the data that it wants. There is only one request, even if the data is deeply nested, and the server only has to fetch exactly what's needed.

Consider the query:

query HeroNameQuery { newhope_hero: hero(episode: NEWHOPE) { name } empire_hero: hero(episode: EMPIRE) { name } jedi_hero: hero(episode: JEDI) { name } }

It looks up the hero of each of the first three Star Wars movies, fetches any information it needs from the backend, and returns only what is requested:

"data": { "HeroNameQuery": { "jedi_hero": { "name": "R2-D2" }, "empire_hero": { "name": "Luke Skywalker" }, "newhope_hero": { "name": "R2-D2" } } }

There are GraphQL implementations for many languages but many of them don't solve the serial IO problem I described to start this post. In fact, a naive GraphQL implementation might issue IO per field of each object requested.

For hack week, I wanted to explore the design of a GraphQL server that issued all of its backend IO in optimally concurrent batches.

Why Haskell?

Dropbox doesn't use Haskell, but I find it to be a great language for exploring design spaces, particularly around execution models. Also, Facebook open sourced their excellent Haxl library which converts code written with serial IO into efficient batched requests. Haxl provides an effect type that, when it can understand that two data fetches are independent, runs them both in parallel. When all Haxl operations are blocked on backend data fetches, only then does it issue the backends. My prototype GraphQL resolvers are surprisingly naive, specified with sequential code. Haxl automatically batches up the requests and hands them to the DataSource for execution.

In addition, there is nothing clever about the GraphQL request handler or graph traversal and filtering -- all cleverness is handled by Haxl.

At this point, you might be thinking "So was anything challenging about this project?" On the data fetch side, no, not really. :) However, I did run into one unexpected snag when using Haxl for data updates: because Haxl tries really hard -- and in a general, composable way -- to run your IO in parallel, you must be careful about how writes and reads are sequenced together. If you leave out the () <- on line 105, Haskell sequences the operations with >> instead of >>= , and Haxl's >> uses the Applicative bind operation instead of the Monad bind operation, and thus it assumes it can run them in parallel. And, as you might expect, issuing a write and read to the same data concurrently doesn't end well. :)

Conclusions

I am very thankful for jdnavarro's excellent GraphQL query parser. With it, in four days, I was able to get a prototype GraphQL server up and running. Using Haxl and Hedis, I have it hooked up to a Redis data source, and it correctly batches all independent IO reads and runs them concurrently.

The Star Wars hero names query above results in two batched backend requests:

fetch star wars batch of size 3: ["FetchEpisode(Jedi)","FetchEpisode(Empire)","FetchEpisode(NewHope)"] fetch star wars batch of size 2: ["FetchCharacter(1000)","FetchCharacter(2001)"]

You can even see that it noticed that R2-D2 is the hero of both movies, and only requested its info once.

The performance is pretty good: on some AWS instances, I measured about 3500 queries per second per machine and a query latency averaging 3 ms. Of course, that could worsen as permissions checks and so on are implemented. On the other hand, the code is completely unoptimized, full of lazy data structures and an unoptimized parser without a parser cache.

The prototype code is open sourced on the Dropbox GitHub.

It's probably possible to build something like Haxl in Python with generators, but you'd have to give up standard loops and list comprehensions, instead using some kind of parallel map operation. You also would not benefit from anything that teases concurrency out of imperative functions like GHC's upcoming ApplicativeDo extension. There are some things that Haskell's restricted effects are uniquely good at. :)

I'd guess it would probably be even trickier to do a good implementation in Go given that the programmer has less control over goroutines than Python's generators and Monads in Haskell. That said, perhaps someone will discover a clean, optimal implementation. We should pay attention to efforts like this.

I think GraphQL will be a huge deal for high-performance web services. It's harder to implement than REST or traditional RPC services, but the reduction in response latencies could be substantial. Naive implementations aren't going to have good performance, but if you are interested in aiming straight at the finish line, Haskell and Haxl will give you a head start.