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Optimizing routing

To optimize performance, scale or configure the OKD HAProxy router. By doing this task, you can ensure efficient traffic management and accommodate specific workload requirements.

Baseline Ingress Controller (router) performance

To establish a performance baseline, review the role of the OKD Ingress Controller. As the router for your cluster, this component serves as the entry point for ingress traffic, directing requests to applications and services configured by using routes and ingresses.

When evaluating a single HAProxy router performance in terms of HTTP requests handled per second, the performance varies depending on many factors. In particular:

  • HTTP keep-alive/close mode

  • Route type

  • TLS session resumption client support

  • Number of concurrent connections per target route

  • Number of target routes

  • Back end server page size

  • Underlying infrastructure (network, CPU, and so on)

While performance in your specific environment will vary, Red Hat lab tests on a public cloud instance of size 4 vCPU/16GB RAM. A single HAProxy router handling 100 routes terminated by backends serving 1kB static pages is able to handle the following number of transactions per second.

In HTTP keep-alive mode scenarios:

Encryption LoadBalancerService HostNetwork

none

21515

29622

edge

16743

22913

passthrough

36786

53295

re-encrypt

21583

25198

In HTTP close (no keep-alive) scenarios:

Encryption LoadBalancerService HostNetwork

none

5719

8273

edge

2729

4069

passthrough

4121

5344

re-encrypt

2320

2941

The default Ingress Controller configuration was used with the spec.tuningOptions.threadCount field set to 4. Two different endpoint publishing strategies were tested: Load Balancer Service and Host Network. TLS session resumption was used for encrypted routes. With HTTP keep-alive, a single HAProxy router is capable of saturating a 1 Gbit NIC at page sizes as small as 8 kB.

When running on bare metal with modern processors, you can expect roughly twice the performance of the public cloud instance above. This overhead is introduced by the virtualization layer in place on public clouds and holds mostly true for private cloud-based virtualization as well. The following table is a guide to how many applications to use behind the router:

Number of applications Application type

5-10

static file/web server or caching proxy

100-1000

applications generating dynamic content

In general, HAProxy can support routes for up to 1000 applications, depending on the technology in use. Ingress Controller performance might be limited by the capabilities and performance of the applications behind it, such as language or static versus dynamic content.

Ingress, or router, sharding should be used to serve more routes towards applications and help horizontally scale the routing tier.

Additional resources

Configuring Ingress Controller liveness, readiness, and startup probes

To ensure accurate health monitoring for your router deployments, configure the timeout values for liveness, readiness, and startup probes. By doing this task, you can adjust the default settings used by the OKD Ingress Controller to better suit your environment.

The liveness and readiness probes of the router use the default timeout value of 1 second, which is too brief when networking or runtime performance is severely degraded. Probe timeouts can cause unwanted router restarts that interrupt application connections. The ability to set larger timeout values can reduce the risk of unnecessary and unwanted restarts.

You can update the timeoutSeconds value on the livenessProbe, readinessProbe, and startupProbe parameters of the router container.

Parameter Description

livenessProbe

The livenessProbe reports to the kubelet whether a pod is dead and needs to be restarted.

readinessProbe

The readinessProbe reports whether a pod is healthy or unhealthy. When the readiness probe reports an unhealthy pod, then the kubelet marks the pod as not ready to accept traffic. Subsequently, the endpoints for that pod are marked as not ready, and this status propagates to the kube-proxy. On cloud platforms with a configured load balancer, the kube-proxy communicates to the cloud load-balancer not to send traffic to the node with that pod.

startupProbe

The startupProbe gives the router pod up to 2 minutes to initialize before the kubelet begins sending the router liveness and readiness probes. This initialization time can prevent routers with many routes or endpoints from prematurely restarting.

The timeout configuration option is an advanced tuning technique that can be used to work around issues. However, these issues should eventually be diagnosed and possibly a support case or Jira issue opened for any issues that cause probes to time out.

The following example demonstrates how you can directly patch the default router deployment to set a 5-second timeout for the liveness and readiness probes:

$ oc -n openshift-ingress patch deploy/router-default --type=strategic --patch='{"spec":{"template":{"spec":{"containers":[{"name":"router","livenessProbe":{"timeoutSeconds":5},"readinessProbe":{"timeoutSeconds":5}}]}}}}'
Verification
$ oc -n openshift-ingress describe deploy/router-default | grep -e Liveness: -e Readiness:
    Liveness:   http-get http://:1936/healthz delay=0s timeout=5s period=10s #success=1 #failure=3
    Readiness:  http-get http://:1936/healthz/ready delay=0s timeout=5s period=10s #success=1 #failure=3

Configuring HAProxy reload interval

To optimize router performance, configure the HAProxy reload interval. The OKD router reloads HAProxy to apply changes to routes or endpoints, generating a new process to handle connections for each update.

HAProxy keeps the old process running to handle existing connections until those connections are all closed. When old processes have long-lived connections, these processes can accumulate and consume resources.

The default minimum HAProxy reload interval is 5 seconds. You can configure an Ingress Controller using its spec.tuningOptions.reloadInterval field to set a longer minimum reload interval.

Setting a large value for the minimum HAProxy reload interval can cause latency in observing updates to routes and their endpoints. To lessen the risk, avoid setting a value larger than the tolerable latency for updates.
Procedure

  • Change the minimum HAProxy reload interval of the default Ingress Controller to 15 seconds by running the following command:

    $ oc -n openshift-ingress-operator patch ingresscontrollers/default --type=merge --patch='{"spec":{"tuningOptions":{"reloadInterval":"15s"}}}'