This also adds a check that forbids any user-supplied metrics to start
with the reserved label name prefix "__".
Change-Id: I2fe94c740b685ad05c4c670613cf2af7b9e1c1c0
So far we've been using Go's native time.Time for anything related to sample
timestamps. Since the range of time.Time is much bigger than what we need, this
has created two problems:
- there could be time.Time values which were out of the range/precision of the
time type that we persist to disk, therefore causing incorrectly ordered keys.
One bug caused by this was:
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/367
It would be good to use a timestamp type that's more closely aligned with
what the underlying storage supports.
- sizeof(time.Time) is 192, while Prometheus should be ok with a single 64-bit
Unix timestamp (possibly even a 32-bit one). Since we store samples in large
numbers, this seriously affects memory usage. Furthermore, copying/working
with the data will be faster if it's smaller.
*MEMORY USAGE RESULTS*
Initial memory usage comparisons for a running Prometheus with 1 timeseries and
100,000 samples show roughly a 13% decrease in total (VIRT) memory usage. In my
tests, this advantage for some reason decreased a bit the more samples the
timeseries had (to 5-7% for millions of samples). This I can't fully explain,
but perhaps garbage collection issues were involved.
*WHEN TO USE THE NEW TIMESTAMP TYPE*
The new clientmodel.Timestamp type should be used whenever time
calculations are either directly or indirectly related to sample
timestamps.
For example:
- the timestamp of a sample itself
- all kinds of watermarks
- anything that may become or is compared to a sample timestamp (like the timestamp
passed into Target.Scrape()).
When to still use time.Time:
- for measuring durations/times not related to sample timestamps, like duration
telemetry exporting, timers that indicate how frequently to execute some
action, etc.
Change-Id: I253a467388774280c10400fda122369ff77c1730
Colliding labels can happen e.g. when an exporter job is scraped and already
includes "job" labels for its samples in /metrics. In this case, a
collisionPrefix of "exporter_" is added to the colliding target labels, but the
specifics (the collision prefix) are managed by Prometheus, not the client
library.
This commit introduces all relevant server-side artifacts such that the
Result streams can be used by external parties for one-off tools and
such. This will ultimately better enable us to support additional
wireformats with much more ease.
Julius Volz