Redis Server-Assisted Client-Side Caching in Python

Itamar Haber | January 9, 2020, updated January 9, 2020 cache client python

Everybody knows that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. This post, as you may have guessed from its name, is about dealing with the first one: cache invalidation problem. I wrote it because a new feature in Redis 6 makes it easier for clients to manage a local cache. This mini-project’s source files can be found in the rsacsc-py repository.

Preface

I am not going to address the need for caching per se. We cache data practically in every aspect of computer engineering to reduce the time it takes us to access it subsequently. We cache on oh-so-many levels, and will continue to do so until someone finally cracks instantaneous communication, and probably afterwards.

Redis is a remote server, meaning any data in it is accessible over the network. From the perspective of a Redis client, network-induced latency is usually the biggest contributor to overall latency. Avoiding repetitive calls by caching previous replies can mitigate that.

Redis uses a key-value store data model, an abstraction that maps a unique identifier to each data structure and the data in it. Because data access is always by key name, it’s easy for a Redis client to store its respective data locally for caching purposes. But that brings up the hard problem of invalidating that cache.

The aptly-named server-assisted client-side caching is a new capability added in Redis version 6. It is intended to assist the management of a local cache by having the server send invalidation notifications. The server tracks the keys accessed by a client and notifies the client when these change.

Because Redis server-assisted client-side caching (RSACSC for short) is admittedly somewhat immature in the first release candidate, I wanted to take it out for a real-world test drive. The idea was to make a proof of concept to get a better feeling for what’s there and what’s still missing.

Design notes

I was leaning towards prototyping this in Python, and a short informal poll supported this approach. I had a three-part setup in mind:

A connection to Redis to read data A cache to keep the data local A manager to tie everything nicely together

To make the connection, I chose redis-py. It provides the Redis class that is a straight-forward zero-fuss client, and Python’s nature makes extending it easy.

The requirements from the cache component are basic, so I was perfectly happy adapting the LRU cache example in Python’s OrderedDict documentation.

Making a regular connection into a cached one

For this experiment, I chose to implement caching for a single Redis command, namely GET . The premise is to make the client use the read through pattern: that is, to attempt a read from the local cache and defer to Redis in case of a miss. Subclassing the Redis client and overriding its get() method gives us the following:

class Redis (redis . Redis): def __init__(self, manager, * args, ** kwargs): super() . __init__(self, * args, ** kwargs) self . _manager = manager self . _client_id = super() . client_id() self . execute_command( 'CLIENT' , 'TRACKING' , 'ON' , 'redirect' , self . _manager . client_id) def get (self, name): try : value = self . _manager . cache[name] except KeyError : value = super() . get(name) self . _manager . cache[name] = value return value

The new Redis class initialization isn’t fancy. It begins by calling its base class’ __init__() and setting a couple of properties. It ends with a call to Redis’ CLIENT TRACKING command, with which it enables the server’s assistance for the connection.

The class’ get() method is where the magic happens. We try to read the key’s value, by name, from the cache that’s available through the connection’s manager. In case of KeyError , or a cache miss, we revert to the base class’ get() to fetch the data and store it in the cache.

Tracking keys in the client

Once the Redis client has opted-in to being tracked, the server maintains a record of keys that the client had read from. Instead of tracking every individual key, Redis uses a hashing function on the keys’ names to assign them to slots. Specifically, it uses the 24 least-significant bits of the key name’s CRC64 digest, resulting in roughly 16 million possible slots.

This reduces the server resources required to track multiple keys for multiple clients. The invalidation messages sent by Redis, therefore, consist of slots that need to be invalidated rather than key names. It is up to the client to infer the relevant key names that need to be removed from its cache given the slot.

That means the client needs to employ the same hashing function to track how the keys in the local cache map to slots. That lets us perform slot-based invalidation of the client’s cache when an invalidation notification arrives. For that, we’ll use the add() and discard() methods when keys are added and discarded from the local cache, respectively.

def slot (key): ''' Returns the slot for a key ''' crc = crc64(key) crc &= 0xffffff return crc def add (self, key): ''' Adds a key to the internal tracking table ''' slot = self . slot(key) self . slots[slot] . add(key) def discard (self, key): ''' Removes a key from the internal tracking table ''' slot = self . slot(key) self . slots[slot] . discard(key)

Handling invalidation

How an invalidation message is sent to a tracked client depends on the Redis Serialization Protocol (RESP) that the client is using. Earlier versions of Redis use RESP2, but its successor RESP3 is already present in Redis 6 and will deprecate the older protocol completely in Redis 7.

RESP3 packs in many new features, including the ability for the server to “push” additional information on an existing connection to a client, alongside the actual replies. This channel is employed for delivering invalidation notifications when using the server-assisted client-side caching ability.

However, because RESP3 is so new, only a few clients currently support it, so RSACSC also works with RESP2. Because RESP2 lacks the “push” ability, RSACSC broadcasts invalidation messages to interested parties using the existing support for PubSub in Redis.

Handling the invalidations and the keys-to-slots mapping is what the manager is for. Here’s what it looks like:

class Manager (object): def __init__(self, pool, capacity = 128 ): self . pool = pool self . capacity = capacity self . client_id = None self . client = redis . Redis(connection_pool = self . pool) self . slots = defaultdict(set) self . cache = Cache(self, maxsize = self . capacity) self . start() def start (self): ''' Starts the manager ''' self . client_id = self . client . client_id() self . _pubsub = self . client . pubsub(ignore_subscribe_messages = True) self . _pubsub . subscribe( ** { '__redis__:invalidate' : self . _handler}) self . _thread = self . _pubsub . run_in_thread()

The manager is initialized with a connection pool, from which it creates its own client for PubSub as well as any subsequent cached connections requested by the using application. It also maintains a dictionary called slots that maps a slot number to the set of key names that it holds. Lastly, it maintains the Cache class that is the LRU cache’s implementation.

The start() method, not surprisingly, starts the manager by beginning to listen to the __redis__:invalidate PubSub channel in a separate thread. The messages intercepted on that channel are handled by the _handler() method. It, in turn, calls the invalidate() method to invalidate the requested slot:

def _handler (self, message): ''' Handles invalidation messages ''' slot = message[ 'data' ] self . invalidate(slot) def invalidate (self, slot): ''' Invalidates a slot's keys ''' slot = int(slot) while self . slots[slot]: key = self . slots[slot] . pop() del self . cache[key]

Invalidation is just a matter of popping keys, one by one, from the respective slot’s set and deleting them from the cache. Lastly, the manager exposes a factory method, get_connection() that’s used by the code for getting new cached connections:

def get_connection (self, * args, ** kwargs): ''' Returns a cached Redis connection ''' conn = CachedRedis(self, connection_pool = self . pool, * args, ** kwargs) return conn

Some measurements

This post isn’t about benchmarking or Python’s performance per se, but it’s important to understand the mechanism’s impact. For that purpose, I’ve used the benchmark.py script on a 2019 MacBook Pro with a Redis instance running locally using defaults (except that I turned off snapshotting).

Before performing the tests, the benchmark script populates the database with 1000 keys and sets up the cache manager with a capacity for 100. It then runs several timed tests to measure performance. Each test is repeated five times for both types of connections: regular and cached.

The result of the first test actually demonstrates one of caching’s disadvantages: cache misses. In this test, single_read , we read every key from the entire database just once, so every access to the local cache results in a miss:

Note that the averages are computed only for the last runs, so every first run in the series is considered a warmup. The averages above show that the missed cache reads add almost 13ms for every 1,000 reads, roughly an 18% latency increase.

However, repeating the test on a dataset that fits into the cache—that is, only 100 keys—shows more encouraging results. While the first cached run shows an increase in latency, subsequent ones reduce latency by two orders of magnitude:

The next test is named eleven_reads because it reads every key in the database once along with 10 other keys that are always the same ones. This highly synthetic use case provides an even more dramatic proof of the cache’s benefit (despite that not being the purpose, per se).

The last test extends eleven_reads with an additional write request to one of the 10 constant keys, which triggers the invalidation of a part of the cache. Latency of cached runs increases slightly, both because of the extra write command but also due to the need to refetch the contents of the cache:

Parting thoughts

This was a good way to spend some time caching. You may already be familiar with Redis’ keyspace notifications, which are events about the keyspace—such as modifications to keys—sent on PubSub channels. Keyspace notifications can, in fact, be used in much the same manner as Redis server-assisted client-side caching, to achieve similar results.

Because PubSub is not a reliable means of transmitting messages, using either keyspace notifications or RESP2-based RSACSC can result in lost invalidation notifications and stale content. With the advent of RESP3, however, RSACSC notifications will be delivered as long as the connection is alive. Any disconnects can then be easily dealt with by a local cache reset.

The move in RESP3 from PubSub broadcasting to connection-specific notifications also means that clients will get invalidation notifications only for slots that interest them. That means less resources spent on communication, and less is better.

Regardless of the RESP version used, client authors can use RSACSC for caching much more than just the GETting of entire strings. The mechanism is agnostic of the actual data structure used for storing the key’s value, so all core Redis types and any custom ones declared by modules can be used with it.

Furthermore, instead of just caching key-value tuples, the client can cache requests and their replies (while keeping track of the keys involved). Doing so enables caching of substrings returned by GETRANGE , list elements obtained via LRANGE , or virtually any other type of query.

A note about Redis’ CRC64 function

The one thing I knew I didn’t want to implement in this exercise was a CRC function. I assumed that Python would already have the right one for me.

To find which CRC Redis is using you could just look at its source code—the file src/crc64.c tells us right at the beginning that:

/* Redis uses the CRC64 variant with "Jones" coefficients and init value of 0. * * Specification of this CRC64 variant follows: * Name: crc-64-jones * Width: 64 bites * Poly: 0xad93d23594c935a9 * Reflected In: True * Xor_In: 0xffffffffffffffff * Reflected_Out: True * Xor_Out: 0x0 * Check("123456789"): 0xe9c6d914c4b8d9ca

I did a quick search for “Python CRC64 jones” and after skimming the docs I chose to pip install crcmod so I can use its predefined crc-64-jones digest.

Some time later, and much more than I’d care to admit, I found the reason why my stuff wasn’t working. A closer inspection of the docs revealed that crcmod uses a different (off-by-one but that’s a different joke) polynomial. Here they are together, can you spot the difference?

Redis 0xad93d23594c935a9 crcmod 0x1AD93D23594C935A9

What’s more, crcmod had adamantly refused to use Redis’ polynomial pettily claiming:

>>> crcmod.mkCrcFun(0xad93d23594c935a9) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: The degree of the polynomial must be 8, 16, 24, 32 or 64

I then, of course, just gave up and ported the Redis CRC64 implementation. Not exactly a hard task: one copy-paste, a few search-replaces, and one line of actual code to rewrite. If you’re going to give RSACSC a go, make sure that the CRC64 implementation you’re using checks out to 0xe9c6d914c4b8d9ca.