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"Wa Eebots Peas!"5/19/2005
I finally got around to bundling up the last few months worth of work on NRobot,
checking it in and calling it a release. There are a bunch of new
features, but the most important is that if you're running under .NET
robots are run in a sandbox - they are no longer given complete control
over your system. This means that it's actually reasonable to download
a robot written by someone you don't know or trust, and attempt to
shoot the crap out of it - as long as you don't pass the "-insecure"
option on the command line.
Another significant improvement in 0.20 is that it now ships with a
sample robot written in Java. This isn't actually an improvement in
NRobot at all, but an improvement in IKVM. As of IKVM 0.14 it is now
possible to apply custom attributes to Java code, which was the only
remaining feature required for use in NRobot. So at last I'm posting
something on my blog that's actually vaguely on topic for Planet
Classpath ;) All you Java programmers, go download it and start writing
robots ;)
Unfortunately there are a couple of catches.
Currently Mono's security support is not complete enough for me to
confidently guarantee your safety if you are running untrusted robot
code in it. Work is ongoing on adding this support and I'm confident
that it will eventually be safe, but if you're running NRobot under
Mono today, I recommend using a user account with restricted
permissions.
The other big catch is that IKVM can't currently generate code that
will run inside a sandbox. Jeroen has done some work proving that this
isn't impossible in theory, but will require very careful auditing of
IKVM code to be certain that no security holes have been introduced. So
for now, you must pass the -insecure option in order to run robots
written in Java - in which case you again ought to run NRobot under a
user account with restricted permissions.
Oh, the other big improvement in 0.20 is a feature that was actually
requested - the ability to fine-tune the strengths and weaknesses of
your robot. You can adjust 8 different properties (roughly categorized
into 4 offensive and 4 defensive) to be either "better", "worse" or
"neutral", but you must be sure that your choices balance out. That is
to say, for every property you make better, you must make another one
worse.
Here's my own robot DLL. Unzip it into the Bots/Win or Bots/Mono
directory (as appropriate) of your NRobot installation. Naturally,
unless you trust me implicitly, you shouldn't do this if you're running
under Mono or with the -insecure flag unless you've taken other
precautions to safeguard your system.
So what the heck does "Wa Eebots Peas!" mean? Well, Alexa loves
watching games of NRobot play themselves. If she sees me working on my
laptop, she'll come over, stare at the screen, and say her best
impression of "Want Robots Please!".
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Performance Victory5/10/2005
I can confidently declare victory in the battle with the performance of
cmScribe's permissions code. A page hit that was taking "about a
minute" every time (the logging that enabled me to determine exactly
how long things are taking wasn't added until later) is now taking 14
seconds on the first hit and is no different than other pages within
the site on subsequent hits.
While working on this I re-learnt another obvious lesson about coding
for performance, which can be summed up as: DON'T trust your instincts, MEASURE. This doesn't
necessarily require complicated profiling tools (although I'm sure if
you know how to use them they can be very useful). All I did was add
code to log every permission lookup and every database hit to a file.
But running a few "grep | wc" operations across the resulting log files
gave me exceptionally useful information about which tables were being
accessed excessively, and proved my gut instincts to be sorely lacking.
My initial feeling was that my best bet would be to try to avoid
excessive hits to two tables, which we'll call TC and V. I spent a
while working on TC and was disappointed to find that I'd only improved
from 43 to 42 seconds. That was when I fired up grep and produced a
little shell script which ran over my initial log giving output like
this:
P: 9115
TC: 735
V: 4408
Turned out I was right about V being critical, entirely wrong that TC
mattered at all (I'd reduced it to 234, which naturally made very
little difference), and horrifyingly wrong to have entirely ignored P
which was the worst offender by an order of magnitude.
The really scary thing about these numbers is that V contains 33
records and never changes at all (except with new builds of the
software) while P contains about 250 and changes rarely (only on
certain administrative actions).
Armed with this knowledge it was an absolute no-brainer to bring the
entire contents of V and P into memory once and leave them there
thereafter (with some code to re-fetch the contents of P when those
administrative actions happen).
Performance improved by a factor of four, DB hits reduced by a factor
of more than ten (from nearly 20,000 to under 1,700), and all without
any need to fundamentally change the architecture of the system.
But I never would have got there if I'd only gone with my instincts
about what could be improved. It was only by producing directly
measurable information about what was really going on that I was able
to spot the evil 9,000 hit table :)
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Programming and Performance5/8/2005
The approach I take to performance issues while coding is that
performance issues should be in the back of your mind at all times. Not
to ignore them, but also to resist the temptation to focus on
performance too much during the design and initial implementation of a
feature, and planning to revisit the issue if performance problems
become apparent later.
This philosophy has both strengths and weaknesses and recent events have showcased both of these.
cmScribe uses a complex and flexible fine-grained permissioning
mechanism where permissions can be granted to all kinds of actions on
all kinds of objects. Having certain permissions can cause others to be
granted implicitly, and the rules for this kind of implication can be
any arbitrary C# code. Since the permissions are so fine-grained, any
given page hit can require a large number of permissions to be
evaluated. Furthermore, the implication rules mean that evaluating one
permission may require a number of others to be evaluated as well.
The system is so complex, in fact, that I struggled quite a lot during
the initial design process to come up with a way of meeting all the
requirements at all. (Is it over-engineered? I don't know. I do know
that after using it for a year there's only one feature I'd have cut,
and that's never been used and doesn't add any complexity) The first
and biggest advantage of keeping performance issues on the backburner
is that if I'd had to juggle performance along with all the other
constraints I was trying to meet, I don't know whether I'd have been
able to produce a working system in the first place. In this case,
deferring performance for later may have made the difference between
impossible and possible.
Since then I've had to revisit this code for performance reasons on two
or three separate occasions. You could look at this as a disadvantage
of the approach I took: surely if performance had been designed in from
the very beginning then I wouldn't have had to repeatedly fix
performance problems later. But you can also look at it as a strength:
the code worked adequately to start with without spending the time on
performance. Later, as more demanding scenarios came up, it was
possible to fix it without too much trouble to again perform
adequately, by a combination of caching frequently-used information in
memory, tweaking the order of operations to make the common cases use
less steps, and micro-optimizing the individual steps to eliminate
avoidable database hits and other expensive operations. I'm in the
middle of an iteration of that process right now, and I'm entirely
confident that I can have it performing adequately again shortly.
The weakness of the approach, however, is that an architecture designed
without considering performance (since I was struggling so much with
all the other issues, performance was probably further back in my mind
even than usual) has turned out to have some performance bottlenecks
that simply can't be removed without changing the architecture itself.
There are situations where it's possible to know based on fixed
information that there's no way a user could possibly have a particular
permission, but that fixed information isn't available within the
architecture, so the code will still chase down a number of dead ends
before it arrives at the answer. And there's no way to make that
information available with little caching tweaks and
micro-optimizations. It needs a whole new structure.
For now, I can continue to tweak the heck out of the existing
architecture and I'm confident it will perform adequately for quite
some time. Which leads to the final advantage - even when you do reach
the point where there's nothing to be done but throw out the whole
thing and start over with performance at the very front of your mind,
the experience gained from the first attempt will be invaluable in
designing the system the right way. Every tweak I make to the existing
code will be designed into the next version from day one.
Sounds a lot better than being stuck a year ago unable to write the
thing at all because I couldn't get my head around how to make it fast, doesn't it? :)
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