A month ago we had a report of some strange behaviour from Dependabot: on some projects, we were creating a "Dependabot can't resolve your Ruby dependency files" issue, only to immediately close it. Hunting down that bug took me right to the core of Bundler's dependency resolution logic, and I spent three weeks working to improve it.

Happily, the result is a 2x speedup for Bundler's resolution logic and a bunch of fixes that mean it now has no known bugs.

The bug

First up, some quick, relevant info about how Dependabot surfaced the issue:

Dependabot creates pull requests for any outdated dependencies in a project's Gemfile . It's a little like running bundle update <dependency> for each dependency

. It's a little like running for each dependency To do so, Dependabot piggy-backs off of Bundler's resolution logic. (If you're curious, the logic is open source.)

If Bundler raises an error during resolution, Dependabot catches it, categorises it, and creates a relevant issue on the project's repository.

The bug we were seeing was that bundle update <dependency> would raise a VersionConflict error, whilst a clean bundle install would execute just fine. That shouldn't happen. Ever.

A quick look at the Bundler repo surfaced these issues and gave me certainty the bug was somewhere in Bundler's resolution logic. Fortunately, that resolution logic is extracted out into its own gem, Molinillo. Time to get bug hunting...

The naive approach (and failure)

To start out with, I thought I might be able to find a simple mistake in Molinillo, without really needing to get to know it. I created a pull request that got the tests passing and fixed my issue locally. Job done, right? Sadly not. Patching Dependabot with my "fix" caused the same error to occur on a different set of Gemfiles! Arghhh! Clearly I didn't know what I was doing, and was going to need to if I was going to fix this bug.

OK, so how's this thing supposed to work?

Time to get to know Molinillo, and dependency resolution in general, properly. Thankfully, Samuel Giddins, who wrote Molinillo, also wrote a guide to its architecture. I can't begin to explain how useful that guide was - thanks Samuel!

Fundamentally, Molinillo resolves dependencies using a backtracking algorithm. If, like me, you have no idea what that is, here's the mental model that I used when thinking about it:

Take each "requirement" from a project's Gemfile and Gemfile.lock and put them in a big array. Each requirement will relate to a single dependency

and and put them in a big array. Each requirement will relate to a single dependency Dynamically build a "tree" from the requirements array as follows: Pick a requirement from the array (intelligently, but more on that later) to become a node in the tree For each dependency version that satisfies the requirement, as well as all previously considered requirements for the dependency, draw an edge coming out of the node. Each edge then represents setting the constrained dependency to that version Pick the highest version edge, add it's sub-dependency requirements (i.e., those in its gemspec ) to the requirements array, and add a new node to its other end, repeating the current process to do so

If at any point there are no possible dependency versions for a newly added node, backtrack to a previous node and explore a different edge of the tree

Resolution is complete when either The requirements array is exhausted, in which case we have a successful resolution. Since we've always been picking the highest version edges first this must be one of the highest version resolutions possible There are no possible dependency versions for the current node, and nowhere to backtrack to. In this case, our initial requirements were unresolvable



Sound simple? It is. But without some speedups, it might also be incredibly slow - the number of possible branches in the tree above grows exponentially with the number of requirements. To keep things fast we want to explore as few of those branches as possible, whilst still guaranteeing we find the best resolution, if one exists.

So, where's the bug?

Armed with my new knowledge of backtracking it was time to confront the Molinillo codebase again. For a resolvable Gemfile to be failing to resolve, the bug was most likely to be in the backtracking step - we were probably backtracking too far and discarding valid branches of the tree.

It turns out that the logic to calculate optimal backtracking is pretty complicated. Struggling to wrap my head around the existing implementation, I decided on the obvious course of action: yak shave. A couple of hours in I had things in a shape I understood much better, and was even able to create a pull request with some minor improvements. It's about this time I had an idea for a big speedup, unrelated to the original bug.

Speeding things up: grouping

Remember the backtracking algorithm I described earlier, where I described creating a new edge for each valid dependency version, and then picking the highest version edge to work on from then on? I realised there was a big speedup to be had by grouping the edges together, and considering several of them at once.

The logic here is simple: if two versions of a dependency have identical sub-dependency requirements, they're basically equivalent in the algorithm previously described, and can be considered as a group. Since the requirements in a dependency's gemspec generally don't change between versions, the groups will often be quite large, and the number of groups for each node quite small. If we have to backtrack and explore lots of different edges, being able to consider whole groups at a time will thus save a lot of iterations.

I had a prototype working in a couple of hours, and some basic benchmarks showing a 10x speedup for some gnarly cases, but there was red all over the codebase. Unsure if it could ever be mergeable I created a pull request and asked Samuel for help.

That's when things got collaborative. Samuel gave me a host of pointers, which I powered through, and then took ownership of making sure the change worked with Bundler / CocoaPods - something that would have taken me forever. Within a few hours things were looking much less proof of concept, and the speedup merged a couple of days later. I can't credit Samuel enough for making that happen - he made working on the project a pleasure.

Back to the bug

Well, that was fun, but I still hadn't fixed the bug. No way was I going to let it beat me now I had an understanding of the codebase...

Before I started on all that speedup work I'd been pretty certain the bug I was hunting was in the way Molinillo decided which node to backtrack to. Time to dig into the theory behind optimal backtracking. Unfortunately there was no section in the architecture guide for this, so I was going to have to write it myself. Here's the basics:

We need to backtrack when there are no dependency versions that would satisfy the current node's requirement, combined with all previous node's requirements for that dependency

The node we should backtrack to is first one that has an edge that gives us a possibility of avoiding the present conflict

Simple? Well, yeah - everything's simple when it's high enough level. The detail on this one is fiendishly complicated, though - figuring out whether an edge has a possibility of avoiding the conflict we're rewinding from is hard. Here's what Molinillo did before my changes:

Consider the current requirement. Before it, there was no conflict. Find the node where an edge was chosen that brought it into existence (i.e., where it was a sub-dependency constraint of the dependency version chosen). Check if we could have chosen a different version there, or for the parent of that node, etc., etc.

Similarly, consider the first requirement for the dependency in conflict. This is where we chose the current grouping of edges, which now contains no elements that satisfy all the subsequent requirements (hence the conflict). Could we have chosen a different grouping of edges?

Backtrack to whichever node from the above is highest up the tree

Pretty sensible. After hours of staring at debug output, though, I realised it was missing some potentially conflict-resolving edges:

The current requirement may not be binding on its own. Suppose the initial requirement was x >= 1.0 , the second requirement was x < 2.0 and the third requirement was x > 2.0 . Relaxing either the second or the third requirement would potentially fix the conflict, but with Molinillo's original logic, relaxing the second requirement wouldn't be considered

, the second requirement was and the third requirement was . Relaxing either the second or the third requirement would potentially fix the conflict, but with Molinillo's original logic, relaxing the second requirement wouldn't be considered We might only have got to the current requirement via a previous conflict, that could have been unwound differently. This case is so horribly complicated you're probably best off just reading the spec to understand it

Great. Add a fix for those and we're sorted, right? Well, yes, as long as it's fast. Which my first attempts were not - considering all those other vertices led to lots of shorter unwinds that weren't previously happening, and ended up yielding the same conflict. I'd made Molinillo "correct", but painfully slow.

Speeding things up again: filtering

How can we be "correct" at the same time as being fast? I bashed my head against the keyboard for another few days. Then eventually I came up with filtering.

Here's the theory (it's generic to any backtracking algorithm):

At the point when a conflict occurs, we have more information than at the point we selected the edges that form our current branch: we now know that the choices we made combine to cause the current conflict

We can use this information to filter a node's edges when considering it as a candidate for backtracking to. Simply having alternative edges to explore isn't enough - we need those edges not to create the same set of requirements that is currently conflicting

Then, after choosing a node to backtrack to and backtracking to it, we can apply the filtering we used during the decision process to actually remove the edges we know will lead us to the same confict as before

Applying the above filtering process makes Molinillo just as snappy with the fixes previously discussed as it was before their application. Here's the pull request that makes it all happen.

Job done

And with those changes, Molinillo can resolve anything that's thrown at it, fast. Which means Bundler can. Which means Dependabot can. 🎉

Want some benchmarks? Of course you do:

Molinillo 0.5.7 Molinillo 0.6.1 Iterations (vertices added) during spec suite run 25,307 3,521 Time to run (original) spec suite 100 times 467 seconds 220 seconds

✌️

Thanks

I'd like to say a huge thanks to Samuel Giddins for all his help over the last few weeks. There is absolutely no way I could have achieved the above without him.

A quick ask

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