dependencies: Remove WebSockets system for sending messages.

Zulip has had a small use of WebSockets (specifically, for the code
path of sending messages, via the webapp only) since ~2013.  We
originally added this use of WebSockets in the hope that the latency
benefits of doing so would allow us to avoid implementing a markdown
local echo; they were not.  Further, HTTP/2 may have eliminated the
latency difference we hoped to exploit by using WebSockets in any
case.

While we’d originally imagined using WebSockets for other endpoints,
there was never a good justification for moving more components to the
WebSockets system.

This WebSockets code path had a lot of downsides/complexity,
including:

* The messy hack involving constructing an emulated request object to
  hook into doing Django requests.
* The `message_senders` queue processor system, which increases RAM
  needs and must be provisioned independently from the rest of the
  server).
* A duplicate check_send_receive_time Nagios test specific to
  WebSockets.
* The requirement for users to have their firewalls/NATs allow
  WebSocket connections, and a setting to disable them for networks
  where WebSockets don’t work.
* Dependencies on the SockJS family of libraries, which has at times
  been poorly maintained, and periodically throws random JavaScript
  exceptions in our production environments without a deep enough
  traceback to effectively investigate.
* A total of about 1600 lines of our code related to the feature.
* Increased load on the Tornado system, especially around a Zulip
  server restart, and especially for large installations like
  zulipchat.com, resulting in extra delay before messages can be sent
  again.

As detailed in
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/12862#issuecomment-536152397, it
appears that removing WebSockets moderately increases the time it
takes for the `send_message` API query to return from the server, but
does not significantly change the time between when a message is sent
and when it is received by clients.  We don’t understand the reason
for that change (suggesting the possibility of a measurement error),
and even if it is a real change, we consider that potential small
latency regression to be acceptable.

If we later want WebSockets, we’ll likely want to just use Django
Channels.

Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulipchat.com>
This commit is contained in:
Anders Kaseorg
2019-07-22 16:43:40 -07:00
committed by Tim Abbott
parent 6fc2a317e9
commit ea6934c26d
50 changed files with 48 additions and 4081 deletions

View File

@@ -841,17 +841,6 @@ LOGGING = {
'requests': {
'level': 'WARNING',
},
'tornado.general': {
# sockjs.tornado sends a lot of ERROR level logs to this
# logger. These should not result in error emails/Zulips.
#
# TODO: Ideally, we'd do something that just filters the
# sockjs.tornado logging entirely, since other Tornado
# logging may be of interest. Might require patching
# sockjs.tornado to do this correctly :(.
'handlers': ['console', 'file'],
'propagate': False,
},
# our own loggers, alphabetized
'zerver.lib.digest': {