Hello, I am Laszlo

Distributed Tracing with gRPC and OpenTelemetry

05/01/2020

This blog post demonstrates distributed tracing for gRPC calls using OpenTelemetry. Application Insights and Zipkin exporters and services are used for visualizing spans.

gRPC is http based protocol. The client uses HttpClient to send requests, while the ASP.NET Core service is using standard HTTP pipeline to process requests and return responses. Both HttpClient and the HTTP pipeline are instrumented with System.Daignostics.DiagnosticListener. DiagnosticListener enables to subscribe to emitted events and activities. While events indicate a point in time notification, activities can describe a time interval. Both may use additional metadata attributes to describe the event or the time span.

For the collection of these events, I am going to use OpenTelemetry's C# client, version 0.2.0-alpha.179 at the time of writing this post.

In this post, I will have a .net core console application as the client and an ASP.NET Core 3.1 service as the server.

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False Cache Sharing with Spans

04/18/2020

Introduction

False cache sharing is a leaky abstraction of the CPU cache. CPUs cache memory in cache lines. Typically a cache line is 64 bytes long. That means when a single byte is required from the memory, the CPU rather brings in a full cache line, 64 bytes of data. This is beneficial from spatial/temporal locality principals. CPU cache is usually hierarchical, it has L1, L2 and L3 levels, each different size and speed. L1 and L2 is owned by the actual processor core, while L3 is a shared cache among all CPU cores.

You can find more details on CPU caching and false sharing in Pro .Net Memory Management by Konrak Kokosa.

Lower cache level being owned by the actual CPU cores means that when a data is modified in a cache line, it has to synchronize with other cores sharing the same cache line. This can have a negative performance effect: even in a synchronization free (at application code level) multithreaded application, the CPU cache might become a bottleneck by keeping their cache lines up-to-date.

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Even or Odd

04/04/2020

Introduction

One of the typical interview questions is deciding about a number if it is even or odd. The task usually goes by given a integer (or array of integers), return a bool (or array of bools) indicating if the number is odd or even.

A typical solution to the problem is using integer remainder operator:

public bool IntegerRemainder(int i) => i % 2 != 0;

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The Knapsack Problem with Hardware Intrinsics

03/07/2020

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kristof for reviewing this post. He gave me great ideas to further discover the problem and to have a better understanding on AVX. Thank you, Kristof.

Introduction to the Problem

The Knapsack problem is an optimization task: given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, create a subset of these items so that their total weight is less than or equal to a given limit, and their total value is maximized.

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NDC London 2020

02/26/2020

I have attended to NDC London 2020 conference, and collected the talks I prefer or suggest for watching on YouTube.

• Make your custom .NET GC - "whys" and "hows" by Konrad Kokosa

  The talk is a deep dive into the internals of implementing a custom ZeroGC and Epsilon GC. I suggest this talk for developers being familiar with the internals of the .net runtime.

• Application Diagnostics in .NET Core 3.1 by David Fowler, Damian Edwards

  Is an essential talk to see how you can use application .net core diagnostics in a cross-platform environment.

• From WCF to gRPC by Mark Rendle

  gRPC is getting traction, Mark has worked on a tool to convert WCF services to gRPC. It is a great talk to learn about gRPC.

• Blazor, a new framework for browser-based .NET apps by Steve Sanderson

  Steve Sanderson gives a great overview on how Blazor renderer can be used for creating native (non-web) apps.

• The Internet of Pwned Things by Troy Hunt

  Troy is one of most known members of the security community. He goes over some of the significant security breaches in the past year. He discusses how companies handle these issues in a good or bad way.

• Ordering the chaos - cleaning logs and ordering events in microservices by Adam Furmanek

  It is a talk about managing logging for distributed system - correlations and ordering log messages. The presenter introduces Lamport's algorithm and gives an initial implementation on it in C#.

• Challenges of Managing CoreFX repo by Karel Zikmund

  .NET Core's CoreFX repo is a large repo with thousands of issues and pull requests. The presenter walks through the key steps to make such a big repository handleable and friendly to the open source community at the same time.

• Turbocharged: Writing High-Performance C# and .NET Code by Steve Gordon

  Bring C# speed to your next level.

• Change your habits: Modern techniques for modern C# by Bill Wagner

  This talk is about ways to modernize your coding style to latest C#.

• Crash, bang, wallop: miscellaneous lessons from exploring a drum kit by Jon Skeet

  The key thought of the talk is about the importance of diversity. The idea is being presented through an electronic drum kit and connecting this kit to software development.

• Navigating microservices with .NET Core by Ryan Nowak

  One of the best talks on microservices: how do you communicate, find other services, manage secrets, visualize problems and monitor performance, using ASP.NET Core and k8s.

• UX Design Fundamentals: What do your users really see by Billy Hollis

  One of the best UI/UX related topics. The presenter shows how to create user friendly interfaces, what are the common mistakes, and why those mistakes are made. He demos small experiences to prove how users really see the screen.

• Fly the Enterprise: Applying Aviation Lessons to DevOps Teams by Kendall Miller

  The person behind Loupe walks through aviation examples for procedures that makes flying better, safer and more reliable. The key question of the talk is how could we apply similar procedures to software development.

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