Using the Sybase ASE Resource Governor

by

Jeff Garbus


The Sybase ASE Resource Governor provides you with a mechanism to limit the resources a given process may request or acquire. If you have very heavy resource drains, it may be that adding this tiny bit of overhead can reduce whatever is currently stressing your system.

If you’ve ever been responsible for database or server
performance, you’ve probably heard complaints along these lines:

“The system was slow last night because a super-user was
downloading 30 million rows of data to his Access database and it cause a bit
of blocking & network bottlenecking.” (For some reason this one seems to
happen disproportionately often at health insurance companies.)

“We have a mixed-use environment with no restrictions on
when various departments can run jobs. Some of these jobs can grab significant
resources over the course of a few minutes and completely halt the rest of the
processing”

“The marketing guys will frequently send coupons to a couple
of thousand folks, but every once in a while they will accidentally try to send
a few million, which hoses the CPU, IO subsystem, and network, all at the same
time.”

“The batch process keeps taking up the entire tempdb
database, creating a lot of calls to the help desk.”

The Resource Governor provides the ASE administrator with a
mechanism to limit the resources a given process may request or acquire. It can
limit the runaway queries at the application or login level. It can limit:

  • i/o cost, estimated and/or actual
  • elapsed time, estimated and/or actual
  • number of rows to be returned, estimated and/or actual
  • The number of pages of tempdb space a process may acquire

Stated differently, you can choose to enforce your resource
limits:

  • Prior to execution
  • During execution
  • Or both

You can also choose a scope for the action. If you have a
complicated batch, you may want the scope to be the batch rather than an
individual SQL Statement. Your choices there are:

  • Query
  • Batch
  • Transaction
  • Batch and transaction

The Systems Administrator can instruct the server to perform
any of the following actions when a resource limitation is exceeded:

  • A warning can be issued
  • The batch can be aborted
  • The transaction can be aborted
  • The login can be terminated (session ended)

You can also set different resource limits for different
times of day. For example, you may choose to let the “batch” login have all the
resources it wants from midnight to 6am, but limit the resources the rest of
the time (of course, you want to make sure your developers know that they need
to put restart logic in their scripts in case the processes are terminated!)

Step 1: Enabling resource limits

Resource limits are enabled at the server level. This allows
the server to allocate memory for time ranges, internal alarms, and to set up
storage structures to apply applicable ranges & limits to login sessions.

Note that this is where we get into a point of contention
with some DBAs, who claim that enabling resource limits slows the server down.
In a sense, they are right; it does take some server resources to maintain the
resource governor; but it’s not that much. If you’re running at 90% of
capacity, you don’t want to add ANY overhead to your box; if you’re running at
30% of capacity, it doesn’t matter a lot. In between, there’s a gray line some
place… the Resource Governor should take up less than 5% of resources, though
these numbers can be difficult to impossible to measure.

Syntax:

sp_configure ‘allow resource limits’,1

Note that this is not a dynamic parameter, and as such, the
server needs to be restarted to take effect.

Step 2: Setting up time ranges

A time range is a contiguous block of time elapsed over a
contiguous block of days over which a resource limit is intended to be enforced.

There is a default time range set up, “at all times,” which
as you may surmise means all of the time.

For example, you may set up a time period of 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, and call that “Prime Time” – you may have another
called “Weekend” which includes Saturday and Sunday; and perhaps another called
“Batch Time” which is midnight to 6am, all 7 days.

These time ranges may overlap, which is good since otherwise
the “at all times” time range (which cannot be removed) would conflict with
everything else.

You get to choose and set them up, like this:

Syntax:

sp_add_time_range name, startday, endday, starttime, endtime

Examples:


sp_add_time_range ‘Prime Time’, Monday, Friday, ’08:00′,’17:00′

— This creates the time range we discussed above, weekdays from 8am to 5pm.

sp_add_time_range ‘Weekend’, Saturday, Sunday, ’00:00′,’00:00′

— … and here’s the other one. Note that we used zero o’clock for both times to include the whole days.

You can change a time range if your business needs change,
somebody is abusing their privileges (always starting something on a boundary
& getting aborted), etc. Note that null values here mean, “Don’t change
anything – we like you just the way you are.”

Syntax:

sp_modify_time_range name, startday, endday, starttime, endtime

Example:


sp_modify_time_range ‘Prime Time’, NULL, NULL, NULL,’17:30′

— changes the time range to extent until 5:30 p.m.

Finally, you can get rid of a time range if you no longer
have use for it, like this:

Syntax:

sp_drop_time_range timerangename 

Example:

sp_drop_time_range ‘Prime Time’

A couple of notes: The default time range may not be
modified or dropped. Also, changes have no effect on active processes, only on
subsequent connections. Finally, you can’t drop a time range that is in use by
a resource limit.

Step 3: Setting up resource limits

Finally, it’s time to add the resource limit.

A resource limit is a way of limiting the effect an
individual process or group of processes may have on a specific resource. For
example, you might limit the marketing application to a specific number of rows
of demographic data returned to their client application, by sending a warning message
to the user. Or, you might limit an access program from retrieving more than
10,000 rows of data, by aborting the application when the server estimates (or
exceeds) the 10,000 rows.

Syntax:

sp_add_resource_limit name, appname, rangename, limittype, limitvalue [,enforced [,action[,scope]]] 

This one bears explanation first, examples second:

Name

Name of the resource limit (null applies to all users of the
application)

Appname

Name of the application to limit as passed in by the client program
(null applies to all applications for a login)

Rangename

This is the time range you specified in the earlier step

Limit type

  • Row_count
    – the number of rows an application can return
  • Elapsed_time
    – the number of elapsed seconds that an application can run
  • Io_
    cost – the cost in io of the query (based upon the optimizers unitless
    measure
  • Tempdb_space
    – the number of pages in tempdb that the query can acquire

Limitvalue

A positive integer <= 231 specifying a value as in
limit types above

Enforced

When is the action to be taken?

1 – Action is taken when the estimated I/O cost of execution exceeds
the specified limit.

2 – Action is taken when the actual row count, elapsed time, or I/O
cost of execution exceeds the specified limit.

3 – Action is taken when either the estimated cost or the actual cost
exceeds the specified limit.

So… 1 is enforced for estimates, 2 is enforced for actual, 3 is
enforced if either is exceeded

Action

What do we do when the limit is exceeded?

1 – issue a warning

2 – abort the batch

3 – abort the transaction

4 – kill the session

Note that the default behavior is to kill the batch

Scope

What are we limiting?

1 – query

2 – query batch

4 – transaction

6 – query batch and transaction

If you don’t specify a scope, this will refer to all scopes

Examples

1)     
Create a limit for all logins that are running isql during prime time
(defined above). Abort the batch if the actual or number of tempdb pages is
greater than 100.

sp_add_resource_limit NULL, isql,’Prime Time’, tempdb_space, 100,3,2

2)     
Create a limit for web_login. For all applications, prime time, issue a
warning if the actual or number of tempdb pages is greater than 100000

sp_add_resource_limit web_login, NULL, ‘Prime Time’, tempdb_space, 100000,3,1 

Rehash

So, the steps were:

1)      Enable
resource limits at the server level

2)      Create
the named time ranges

3)      Define
the limits on the specific resources to take effect during your time range or
the default (“at all times”)

Limit hierarchies

As you’ve seen, you have the ability to create resource
limits at either the application or the login level.

What happens when both apply? What if they conflict?

Adaptive Server checks limits in this order:

1.       check
limits for a login/application combo

2.       check
limits for a application

3.       check
limits for a login

Once it finds a limit, it stops looking. So, no conflicts
are possible.

Possibilities

The obvious possibilities are listed above; you can stop
specific users and/or applications from monopolizing or abusing your system.

There are some other possibilities too. For example, in any
client / server application you run the risk that folks will, for example, log
in through their excel spreadsheet and make changes directly to your system.
You probably don’t want users to do this.

You can force users to use only known applications like
this:

1)      Using
the “at all times” range, set each limit type to abort when the limit hits
zero. This stops the users from running anything.

2)      Turn
on the acceptable applications for all users to the settings you’re willing to
allow them to use.

Viewing resource limits

What limits have already been set? As with many other ASE
tools, it’s an sp_help variant.

Syntax:

sp_help_resource_limit [name [,appname[, limittime [, limitday [, scope [,action [,verbose] ]]]]]]

-or-

sp_help_resource_limit @verbose = 1

Once again, we’ll define first, and offer examples second:

Name

Name of the resource limit. Default is the current login; only a
login with the sa_role can look at limits for other logins

appname

Name of the application for which we want information; if null, this
refers to all applications

Limittime

The time the limit is enforces; if null, all times)

Limitday

Day of the week for enforcement; default is all days

Scope

Limit of the scope (see scope numbering, above); null means all
scopes

Action

Action for the limit (see action numbering, above); null means all
actions

Verbose

Translates numbers to verbiage

Modifying resource limits

You can modify the action or the value upon which the action
acts.

Syntax

sp_modify_resource_limit name, appname, time range,limittype, limitvalue, enforced, action, scope

As these are all defined above, we won’t repeat them here.
Should you choose not to modify the limit of either the action or the value,
use either the existing value or null for the parameter. All other values must
match the initially created values. If this is insufficient to your needs, drop
& recreate the resource limit.

Removing resource limits

Limits can also be removed, as follows.

Syntax

sp_drop_resource_limit name, appname, rangename, limittype, action, scope

Again, the parameters are the same, so we won’t rehash.

Summary

Resource limits give you a great degree of control over the
resources in your environment. Impact is relatively low. On the flip side, if
you have very heavy resource drains, it may be that adding this tiny bit of
overhead can reduce whatever is currently stressing your system, or at least
cut it down to something manageable.

Limits can change based upon who is running, what they are
running, and what time the application is running, or any combination thereof.

Limits can be enforced based upon estimated, actual, or
either utilization. When the limit is exceeded, you have your choice as to
whether to send a warning, or abort the query at several different levels.

Additional Resources


Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15 Underused features for the DBA

A 20-year veteran of
Sybase ASE database administration, design, performance, and scaling, Jeff Garbus
has written over a dozen books, many dozens of magazine articles, and has
spoken at dozens of user’s groups on the subject over the years. He is CEO of
Soaring Eagle Consulting, and can be reached at Jeff Garbus.

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