WinInet: Why does first ever HttpSendRequest take longer? - wininet

I promise this isn't as simple as it sounds. I'm wondering why the the first ever call to HttpSendRequest takes much longer than subsequent calls, even when the later requests are for a different URL. For example:
InternetConnect(... "foo.com" ...) // returns immediately
HttpOpenRequest(...) // returns immediately
HttpSendRequest(...) // takes ~3 sec
HttpSendRequest(...) // takes ~200 ms
InternetConnect(... "bar.com" ...) // returns immediately
HttpOpenRequest(...) // returns immediately
HttpSendRequest(...) // takes ~200 ms
Why does the first HttpSendRequest(...) take so much longer? This is very consistent, regardless of the URLs.
Thanks,
Greg

There are several things that may need to happen on the first request that don't need to happen on the second. DNS lookup and proxy detection immediately come to mind.

It could also be config file loading. Some of the .Net framework classes will attempt to read settings from the application config file, revertign to defaults if no file or setting is found. E.g. WebRequest/WebClient which I think are Http classes use under the hood will check for explicit web proxy settings, if those don't exist then then proxy setting from the OS (as set within IE) are picked up. Allof this contributes to an initial startup lag usually when the class is first used, that is, the work is often done in within a static contructor.
The config settings are defined here:
Configuration File Schema for the .NET Framework

Related

StorageProvider: What is populating and what does PopulationPolicy do?

I'm reading up on Cloud file storage, and ran across the PopulationPolicy property under Storage.Provider.StorageProviderSyncRootInfo, but I'm not sure what this does. The definition that msdn provided to just cut off. Under the Fields section, AlwaysFull sounds similar to how the first part of HydrationPolicyModifier's ValidationRequired field works ("it guarantees that the data returned by the sync provider is always persisted to the disk prior to it being returned to the user application"). I believe that hydration fills the placeholder object with the correct data from the cloud (correct me), but I'm confused about what populate does.
What is populating?
What does changing the PopulationPolicy to Full and AlwaysFull do?
Population is about files and folders (placeholders), not their content (Hydration).
If you don't use AlwaysFull (so the only valid value left is Full), the platform will call your engine back with CF_CALLBACK_TYPE_FETCH_PLACEHOLDERS, otherwise this type of callback will not be used.

Restrict feathers service method to user for external but allow any queries for internal calls

I want to restrict calls to a Feathers service method for externals calls with associateCurrentUser.
I also want to allow the server to call this service method without restricting it.
The use case is that through this service then clients use a lock table, all clients can see all locks, and occasionally the server should clear out abandoned rows in this table. Row abandonment can happen on network failures etc. When the server removes data then the normal Feathers remove events should be emitted to the clients.
I would imagine that this should be a mix of associateCurrentUser and disallow hooks but I can't even begin to experiment with this as I don't see how it would be put together.
How would one implement this, please?
Update:
I found this answer User's permissions in feathers.js API from Daff which implies that if the hook's context.params.provider is null then the call is internal, otherwise external. Can anyone confirm if this is really so in all cases, please?
It seems to be so from my own tests but I don't know if there are any special cases out there that might come and bite me down the line.
If the call is external params.provider will be set to the transport that has been used (currently either rest, socketio or primus, documented here, here and here).
If called internally on the server there is not really any magic. It will be whatever you pass as params. If you pass nothing it will be undefined if you pass (or merge with) hook.params in a hook it will be the same as what the original method was called with.
// `params` is an empty object so `params.provider` will be `undefined`
app.service('messages').find({})
// `params.provider` will be `server`
app.service('messages').find({ provider: 'server' })
// `params.provider` will be whatever the original hook was called with
function(hook) {
hook.app.service('otherservice').find(hook.params);
}

Data Studio connector making multiple calls to API when it should only be making 1

I'm finalizing a Data Studio connector and noticing some odd behavior with the number of API calls.
Where I'm expecting to see a single API call, I'm seeing multiple calls.
In my apps script I'm keeping a simple tally which increments by 1 every url fetch and that is giving me the correct number I expect to see with getData().
However, in my API monitoring logs (using Runscope) I'm seeing multiple API requests for the same endpoint, and varying numbers for different endpoints in a single getData() call (they should all be the same). E.g.
I can't post the code here (client project) but it's substantially the same framework as the Data Connector code on Google's docs. I have caching and backoff implemented.
Looking for any ideas or if anyone has experienced something similar?
Thanks
Per the this reference, GDS will also perform semantic type detection if you aren't explicitly defining this property for your fields. If the query is semantic type detection, the request will feature sampleExtraction: true
When Data Studio executes the getData function of a community connector for the purpose of semantic detection, the incoming request will contain a sampleExtraction property which will be set to true.
If the GDS report includes multiple widgets with different dimensions/metrics configuration then GDS might fire multiple getData calls for each of them.
Kind of a late answer but this might help others who are facing the same problem.
The widgets / search filters attached to a graph issue getData calls of their own. If your custom adapter is built to retrieve data via API calls from third party services, data which is agnostic to the request.fields property sent forward by GDS => then these API calls are multiplied by N+1 (where N = the amout of widgets / search filters your report is implementing).
I could not find an official solution for this either, so I invented a workaround using cache.
The graph's request for getData (typically requesting more fields than the Search Filters) will be the only one allowed to query the API Endpoint. Before starting to do so it will store a key in the cache "cache_{hashOfReportParameters}_building" => true.
if (enableCache) {
cache.putString("cache_{hashOfReportParameters}_building", 'true');
Logger.log("Cache is being built...");
}
It will retrieve API responses, paginating in a look, and buffer the results.
Once it finished it will delete the cache key "cache_{hashOfReportParameters}building", and will cache the final merged results it buffered so far inside "cache{hashOfReportParameters}_final".
When it comes to filters, they also invoke: getData but typically with only up to 3 requested fields. First thing we want to do is make sure they cannot start executing prior to the primary getData call... so we add a little bit of a delay for things that might be the search filters / widgets that are after the same data set:
if (enableCache) {
var countRequestedFields = requestedFields.asArray().length;
Logger.log("Total Requested fields: " + countRequestedFields);
if (countRequestedFields <= 3) {
Logger.log('This seams to be a search filters.');
Utilities.sleep(1000);
}
}
After that we compute a hash on all of the moving parts of the report (date range, plus all of the other parameters you have set up that could influence the data retrieved form your API endpoints):
Now the best part, as long as the main graph is still building the cache, we make these getData calls wait:
while (cache.getString('cache_{hashOfReportParameters}_building') === 'true') {
Logger.log('A similar request is already executing, please wait...');
Utilities.sleep(2000);
}
After this loop we attempt to retrieve the contents of "cache_{hashOfReportParameters}_final" -- and in case we fail, its always a good idea to have a backup plan - which would be to allow it to traverse the API again. We have encountered ~ 2% error rate retrieving data we cached...
With the cached result (or buffered API responses), you just transform your response as per the schema GDS needs (which differs between graphs and filters).
As you start implementing this, you`ll notice yet another problem... Google Cache is limited to max 100KB per key. There is however no limit on the amount of keys you can cache... and fortunately others have encountered similar needs in the past and have come up with a smart solution of splitting up one big chunk you need cached into multiple cache keys, and gluing them back together into one object when retrieving is necessary.
See: https://github.com/lwbuck01/GASs/blob/b5885e34335d531e00f8d45be4205980d91d976a/EnhancedCacheService/EnhancedCache.gs
I cannot share the final solution we have implemented with you as it is too specific to a client - but I hope that this will at least give you a good idea on how to approach the problem.
Caching the full API result is a good idea in general to avoid round trips and server load for no good reason if near-realtime is good enough for your needs.

How can I configure Polymer's platinum-sw-* to NOT cache one URL path?

How can I configure Polymer's platinum-sw-cache or platinum-sw-fetch to cache all URL paths except for /_api, which is the URL for Hoodie's API? I've configured a platinum-sw-fetch element to handle the /_api path, then platinum-sw-cache to handle the rest of the paths, as follows:
<platinum-sw-register auto-register
clients-claim
skip-waiting
on-service-worker-installed="displayInstalledToast">
<platinum-sw-import-script href="custom-fetch-handler.js"></platinum-sw-import-script>
<platinum-sw-fetch handler="HoodieAPIFetchHandler"
path="/_api(.*)"></platinum-sw-fetch>
<platinum-sw-cache default-cache-strategy="networkFirst"
precache-file="precache.json"/>
</platinum-sw-cache>
</platinum-sw-register>
custom-fetch-handler.js contains the following. Its intent is simply to return the results of the request the way the browser would if the service worker was not handling the request.
var HoodieAPIFetchHandler = function(request, values, options){
return fetch(request);
}
What doesn't seem to be working correctly is that after user 1 has signed in, then signed out, then user 2 signs in, then in Chrome Dev Tools' Network tab I can see that Hoodie regularly continues to make requests to BOTH users' API endpoints like the following:
http://localhost:3000/_api/?hoodieId=uw9rl3p
http://localhost:3000/_api/?hoodieId=noaothq
Instead, it should be making requests to only ONE of these API endpoints. In the Network tab, each of these URLs appears twice in a row, and in the "Size" column the first request says "(from ServiceWorker)," and the second request states the response size in bytes, in case that's relevant.
The other problem which seems related is that when I sign in as user 2 and submit a form, the app writes to user 1's database on the server side. This makes me think the problem is due to the app not being able to bypass the cache for the /_api route.
Should I not have used both platinum-sw-cache and platinum-sw-fetch within one platinum-sw-register element, since the docs state they are alternatives to each other?
In general, what you're doing should work, and it's a legitimate approach to take.
If there's an HTTP request made that matches a path defined in <platinum-sw-fetch>, then that custom handler will be used, and the default handler (in this case, the networkFirst implementation) won't run. The HTTP request can only be responded to once, so there's no chance of multiple handlers taking effect.
I ran some local samples and confirmed that my <platinum-sw-fetch> handler was properly intercepting requests. When debugging this locally, it's useful to either add in a console.log() within your custom handler and check for those logs via the chrome://serviceworker-internals Inspect interface, or to use the same interface to set some breakpoints within your handler.
What you're seeing in the Network tab of the controlled page is expected—the service worker's network interactions are logged there, whether they come from your custom HoodieAPIFetchHandler or the default networkFirst handler. The network interactions from the perspective of the controlled page are also logged—they don't always correspond one-to-one with the service worker's activity, so logging both does come in handy at times.
So I would recommend looking deeper into the reason why your application is making multiple requests. It's always tricky thinking about caching personalized resources, and there are several ways that you can get into trouble if you end up caching resources that are personalized for a different user. Take a look at the line of code that's firing off the second /_api/ request and see if it's coming from an cached resource that needs to be cleared when your users log out. <platinum-sw> uses the sw-toolbox library under the hood, and you can make use of its uncache() method directly within your custom handler scripts to perform cache maintenance.

How do BundleActivator, ManagedService, and my application interact on start/stop?

I had a non-OSGi application. To convert it to OSGi, I first bundled it up and gave it a simple BundleActivator. The activator's start() started up a thread of what used to be the main() of my app (and is now a Runnable), and remembered that thread. The activator's stop() interrupted that thread, and waited for it to end (via join()), then returned. This all seemed to be working fine.
As a next step in the OSGiification process, I am now trying to use OSGi configuration management instead of the Properties-based configuration that the application used to use. So I am adding in a ManagedService in addition to the Activator.
But it's no longer clear to me how I am supposed to start and stop my application; examples that I've seen are only serving to confuse me. Specifically, here:
http://felix.apache.org/site/apache-felix-config-admin.html
They no longer seem to do any real starting of the application in BundleActivator.start(). Instead, they just register a ManagedService to receive configuration. So I'm guessing maybe I start up the app's main thread when I receive configuration, in the ManagedService? They don't show it - the ManagedService's updated() just has vague comments saying to "apply configuration from config admin" when it is passed a non-null Dictionary.
So then I look here:
http://blog.osgi.org/2010/06/how-to-use-config-admin.html
In there, it seems like maybe they're doing what I guessed. They seem to have moved the actual app from BundleActivator to ManagedService, and are dealing with starting it when updated() receives non-null configuration, stopping it first if it's already started.
But now what about when the BundleActivator's stop() gets called?
Back on the first example page that I mentioned above, they unregister the ManagedService. On the second example page, they don't show what they do.
So I'm guessing maybe unregistering the ManagedService will cause null configuration to be sent to ManagedService.updated(), at which point I can interrupte the app thread, wait for it to end, and then return?
I suspect that I'm thoroughly incorrect, but I don't know what the "real" way to do this is. Thanks in advance for any help.
BundleActivator (BA) and ManagedService (MS) are callbacks to your bundle. BundleActivator is for the active state of your bundle. BA.start is when you bundle is being started and BA.stop is when it is being stopped. MS is called to provide your bundle a configuration, if there is one, or notify you there is no configuration.
So in BA.start, you register your MS service and return. When MS is called (on some other thread), you will either receive your configuration or be told there is no configuration and you can act accordingly (start app, etc.)
Your MS can also be called at anytime to advice of the modification or deletion of your configuration and you should act accordingly (i.e. adjust your app behavior).
When you are called at BA.stop, you need to stop your app. You can unregister the MS or let the framework do it for you as part of normal bundle stop processing.