Hey there! I have a really weird issue with Kubern...
# ask-communityr
Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:33 AMHey there! I have a really weird issue with Kubernetes Jobs that I can’t wrap my head around: I try to start around 150 flows from on orchestrator flow. I do this because I need to parallelize across K8s pods instead of threads. This works, but only around 50 of my Flow-Runs actually transition into
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:36 AMdoes kubectl describe pods *${POD_NAME}* reveal anything?
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:37 AMThere is no pods (or jobs) on K8s yet, that’s the problem. Prefect doesn’t even try to start the jobs it seems
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:37 AMAh sorry I thought you meant pending pod
redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:38 AMThis works, but only around 50 of my pods actually get into a running state, the other 100 just idle around in “Pending”
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:40 AMYou are completely right, I described that very badly. Fixed it now. Thanks a lot 🙂
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:40 AM🙂
redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:41 AMAre you using a single prefect agent in k8's
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:43 AMYes I do
Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:44 AMI was thinking that there might be some implicit limit for jobs spawned, but the weird thing is that it spawns exactly 52 jobs and not 50
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 9:46 AMHmmm odd number - I have not tried to spin up as many flows at once as that. Just wondering if you need to shard it across agents, does the agent log report anything
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 9:47 AMunfortunately it logs everything that every single pod logs so it’s pretty hard to get any useful information from it 😕
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 10:03 AMI am not sure if two agents to one queue distribute the work semi evenly or does first one to poll grab 'all' the work - you may need to set the concurrency on the work-queue to stop this from happening and split the load across n agents
redsquare
10/21/2022, 10:05 AMhmm but not sure if the concurrency is per agent or overall
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 10:07 AMI have just a single agent instance running so this shouldn’t be a problem I think 🤔 I also tried to fix the work queue concurrency limit to 200 but it didn’t change anything. I have this fear that it’s somehow related to rate limiting on the free Prefect Cloud Tier but I have no idea how to verify this
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 10:20 AMLooking at the agent code it gets just 10 flows each time it polls so you could run another agent and see if you get over 52 concurrent - I have not seen any word about limits 🤷♂️
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 10:52 AMThe problem is that then I’ll also need to change the DB because it’s currently using the SQLite one 😕
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redsquare
10/21/2022, 11:02 AMthe agents are independent of the orion db backed by sqllite though?
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Robin Weiß
10/21/2022, 12:37 PMAre you sure about that? 🤔 I just saw the following line in the agent manifest on discourse:
replicas: 1 _# We're using SQLite, so we should only run 1 pod_c
Christopher Boyd
10/21/2022, 1:10 PMhow many max connections do you have on the database
Christopher Boyd
10/21/2022, 1:16 PMSQLite only allows one mutation per connection, and it locks ; when you are running 50 tasks in a flow concurrently, SQLITE is only performing a singular write transaction at a time, for each state, each task, each transition
Christopher Boyd
10/21/2022, 1:16 PMChristopher Boyd
10/21/2022, 1:17 PMit’s not really designed or meant to scale, that’s where postgres should come in
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Robin Weiß
10/24/2022, 7:37 AM@Christopher Boyd Thanks, that’s very helpful! Is there any way to validate that it’s definitely the SQLite limiting concurrency and no other factor? I only want to avoid adding new infrastructure to our stack only to end up with the same problem again :D
Robin Weiß
10/25/2022, 6:27 AM@Christopher Boyd I just realized one more thing: Is it even possible to configure Orion to use Postgres as a DB if I use the Prefect Cloud? Does the agent even use it’s own DB if it’s just running the
["prefect", "agent", "start", "-q", "kubernetes"]c
Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 12:34 PMsorry, I didn’t realize you were using prefect cloud, they are separate
Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 12:38 PMI don’t rightly know here, I imagine you’re hitting a limit , but I need to get some more details and research
Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 1:05 PMDo you have any tags registered or used at all?
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Robin Weiß
10/25/2022, 1:38 PMit’s very interesting, the log show that the Agent keeps trying to schedule the same flow run again and again:
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13:37:34.302 | DEBUG | prefect.agent - Checking for flow runs...
13:37:34.524 | INFO | prefect.agent - Submitting flow run '<SAME_FLOW_RUN_ID>'Robin Weiß
10/25/2022, 1:38 PMHm there is some tags on the deployments but i don’t really use them other than for organizing the UI
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Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 2:12 PMDo you have concurrency limits set at all? https://docs.prefect.io/concepts/tasks/#task-run-concurrency-limits
Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 2:12 PMThey are set on tags, so it’s possible even if by accident
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Robin Weiß
10/25/2022, 2:42 PMI do but they are all way lower (5, 10) so it couldn’t be them I think, since I see ~40-50 pods actually spawn up
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Christopher Boyd
10/25/2022, 4:24 PMat risk of the obvious, what happens if you set the limit to something like 100
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Robin Weiß
10/26/2022, 1:03 PMNothing unfortunately ;(