rsyslog template plugins

As I have written yesterday, I am evaluating the use of “template modules” in rsyslog.

In that post, I mentioned that I’d expect a 5% speedup as proof that the new plugin type was worth considering. As it turns out, this method seems to provide a speedup factor of 5 to 6 percent, so it seems to be useful in its own right.

After I had written yesterday’s post, I checked what it would take to create a test environment. It turned out that it was not too hard to change the engine so that I could hardcode one of the default templates AND provide a vehicle to activate that code via the configuration file. Of course, we do not yet have full loadable modules, but I was able to create a proof of concept in a couple of hours and do some (mild) performance testing on it. The current code provides a vehicle to use a c-function based template generator. It is actiated by saying

$template tpl,=generator

where the equal sign indicates to use a C generator instead of the usual template string. The name that follows the equal sign that will probably later become the actual module name, but is irrelevant right now. I then implemented a generator for the default file format in a very crude way, but I would expect that a real loadable module will not take considerably more processing time (just a very small amount of calling overhead after the initial config parsing stage). So with that experimental code, I could switch between the template-based default file format and the generator based format, with the outcome being exactly the same.

Having that capability, I ran a couple of performance tests. I have to admit I did not go to a real test environment, but rather used my (virtualized) standard development machine. Also, I ran the load generator inside the same box. So there were a lot of factors that influenced the performance, and this for sure was no totally valid test. To make up for that, I ran several incarnations of the same test, with 1 to 10 million of test messages. The results quite consistently reported a speedup between 5 and 6 percent achieved by the C template generator. Even though the test was crude, this consistently seen speedup is sufficient proof for me that native template generators actually have value in them. I have to admit that I had expected improvements in the 1 to 2 percent area, so the 5 and more percent is considerable.

I committed the experimental branch to git, so everyone is free to review and test it oneself.

Now that I am convinced this is a useful addition, my next step will be to add proper code for template plugins (and, along that way, decide if they will actually be called template plugins — I guess library plugins could be used as well and with somewhat less effort and greater flexibility). Then, I will convert the canned templates into such generators and included them statically inside rsyslog (just like omfile and a couple of other modules are statically included inside rsyslog). I hope that in practice we will also see this potential speedup.

Another benefit is that any third party can write new generator functions. Of course, there is some code duplication inside such functions. But that should not be a bit issue, especially as generator functions are usually expected to be rather small (but of course need not be so). If someone intends to write a set of complex generator functions, these can be written with a common core module whom’s utility functions are accessed by each of the generators. But this is not of my concerns as of now.

Note that I will probably use very simple list data structures to keep track of the available generators. The reason is that after the initial config file parsing, access to these structures is no longer required and so there is no point in using a more advanced method.

I expect my effort to take a couple of days at most, but beware that Thursday is a public holiday over here in Germany and I may not work on the project on Thursday and Friday (depending, I have to admit, a little bit on the weather ;)).