Stack trace dump on Go

I'm from Java world. Means I spend most of the time coding things on Java and running them in Java Virtual Machine. This has own benefits and disadvantages. For example, I really wish JVM would use less memory and be faster from the start. It is awesome you can benefit from JIT eventually, but till then you should wait a code to run for thousands times before it can be translated into machine code.

At the same time, Java has bunch of benefits. I believe the most important one is a set of available tools: from small utilities to powerful IDEs to application servers.

One of such utility tools is jstack. It is use to print a stack dump of application threads, including main one. What a useful thing! Saved so many time when I tried to investigate why my application got stuck or is really hard on CPU.

And it is also one of the tools I really needed a few days ago: I had to understand why service written on Go is so eager for CPU resources. I spent some time searching for a tool that would work similarly to jstack but for a Go application. Couldn't find one. Yet found how to get a stack trace with a small change in my Go application.

Go standard library already has everything you need to print a stack dump: signals support to notify application and runtime.Stack function to get stack dump, and print it.

NOTE: signals are primarily supported on UNIX based systems, it means this approach might not work as expected on Windows.


And now you can run you program, and ask for a stack dump by sending a signal using kill command:

$ killall -SIGQUIT accountservice

and you'd see something like this


Output consists of stack traces for each goroutine. Each stack trace starts with 'goroutine', its number and current state. Stack trace, like Java one, shows the most recent operation on top, contains code file name (not a class name), line number, and also function parameters. Also stack trace contains information about goroutine creator.

Now, it should be easy to find why application got stuck, or what is it currently doing so that almost all CPU is used up. However, this solution might not work always: in case all resources are used, it might take a time until SIGQUIT notification is processed by application.

Simple RESTful API on Go (with Gin)

It is very populate to use Go to create microservice applications. And actually there are many benefits when using Go comparing to other technologies: it is easy to start, easy to create, and so cheap to run that on your servers. The last one is one of my favorites. Go application has so small footprint on memory and CPU comparing to Java applications, and the same time runs faster.

In this post, I want to show how to create a simple RESTful web service on Go using awesome Gin library.

First, lets create an main function, that sets up logging, Gin router with registered paths and handlers. Gin provides a simple way to create template-like paths and register a handler for each path.

Now lets create DTOs for our business models, and methods to convert from model to DTO:

Finally, need to create functions to handle requests. Again, super easy with Gin:

And we are done. Well, almost, as those examples don't actual models and functions to work with storage.

Simple configuration on Go

Very often your new tool/service needs to have a configuration defined either via parameters or configuration file.
For example, you want to have different settings in development and production environments, or you just have a separate fleets for different clients.

It is pretty easy to add configuration support to you Go application using YAML for configurations and gopkg.in/yaml.v2 for deserializing YAML files into struct value.

Here is an example YAML configuration file. It contains service name and its listening endpoint, and also database connection URL. Pretty simple!

To read configuration, we first open and read whole configuration file, and then use yaml package to unmarshal it into value of Configuration type.

And finally a part of main function in our application, where we use parameter to pass a path to the configuration file, and load it to use configuration later:

That's it. Simple and fast!

Reinforcing feedback loops

There are two different types of feedback loops recognized in systems:

1. Balancing feedback loops
2. Reinforcing feedback loops

Balancing feedback loop controls inflow and outflow of resources. Example of it would be amount of money on the bank account. Amount increases if you put money into, and decreases if you withdraw them.

Reinforcing feedback loop is a different kind of animal. It isn't as strait forward as balancing feedback loop. Example of it would be interest rate for the bank account. The more you have money, the larger interest you get. The larger interest you get, the more money on you bank account you have. Another example of reinforcing feedback loop would be well know dependency between education and social status: if you have money, you can get better education, the better education you have, the more you can earn etc.

Many people are very focused on balancing feedback loops and give little attention to reinforcement feedback loops. At the same time latter one are very important in our life.

Reinforcing feedback loops are very important in our life. They can allow fast growth or decay. They are that magic behind growth of many successful companies.

The better Google's search is, the more people use it. The more people use it, the more data Google has to improve its search.

The better apps on your iPhone, the more you use it. The more you use it, the better apps are becoming. The better apps, the more you use iPhone. Similar thing with AppStore.

The more you invest into some company XTZ, they more money it would have. The more money they have, the more successful they are. The more successful they are, the more stock growths. The more stock growths, the more chances you keep investing.

And so many and many examples.

Reinforcement feedback loop is one behind "Success for successful and fail for failures" trap.

Thus, creating successful enterprise is not only about good old balancing feedback loop. It is always a lot about reinforcing feedback loop behind it.

Wonderful book on this:

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

See it on Goodreads







Links:

• http://www.systems-thinking.org/theWay/sre/re.htm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdGxIameiM8