vm-monitor

The vm-monitor (or just monitor) is a core component of the autoscaling system, along with the autoscale-scheduler and the autoscaler-agents. The monitor has two primary roles: 1) notifying agents when immediate upscaling is necessary due to memory conditions and 2) managing Postgres' file cache and a cgroup to carry out upscaling and downscaling decisions.

More on scaling

We scale CPU and memory using NeonVM, our in-house QEMU tool for use with Kubernetes. To control thresholds for receiving memory usage notifications, we start Postgres in the neon-postgres cgroup and set its memory.{max,high}.

• See also: neondatabase/autoscaling
• See also: neondatabase/vm-monitor, where initial development of the monitor happened. The repository is no longer maintained but the commit history may be useful for debugging.

Structure

The vm-monitor is loosely comprised of a few systems. These are:

• the server: this is just a simple axum server that accepts requests and upgrades them to websocket connections. The server only allows one connection at a time. This means that upon receiving a new connection, the server will terminate and old one if it exists.
• the filecache: a struct that allows communication with the Postgres file cache. On startup, we connect to the filecache and hold on to the connection for the entire monitor lifetime.
• the cgroup watcher: the CgroupWatcher polls the neon-postgres cgroup's memory usage and sends rolling aggregates to the runner.
• the runner: the runner marries the filecache and cgroup watcher together, communicating with the agent throught the Dispatcher, and then calling filecache and cgroup watcher functions as needed to upscale and downscale