Retroactive User Recognition at scale without redis

[viggin543]

Problem

According to docs the current implementation stores all anonymous events in Redis
This has two significant downsides:

• A single point of failure ( One redis writer has a limit of how much traffic it can handle )
• huge ram cost

As you pointed out in the documentation:

REDIS RAM = 1 Event Size * Events per month

1 event ~= 2 Kbyte
10 000 000 events per month ~= 20GB RAM per month

10M events / month is really not that much.
its ~ 231 events per minute or 3.4 events per second.

Large scale tracking load is mesured in thousends of events per second.

At this point redis ram consumption will explode.

Solution

Implement Retroactive User Recognition is a background task, no need to store those events in a hot cache like redis.
Instead they can be stored in any cloud storage as files ( under a path containing the user anonymous id )
This solves the ram consumption problem.
And once a user is identified
a background process can update the records according with the identified user.

In this scenario redis will only contain the coordinating info ( and can be updated asyncronuesly )

[vklimontovich]

The whole user recognition flow relies on the fact that we could pull user by anonymous_id relatively quickly. Besides redis following storages will work:

• S3. Unlike regular file system, they can handle dirs with unlimited files
• LevelDB (or similar)

Here are the caveats:

• I'm not sure we can write to S3 in real-time
• With any local DB, we need to deal with sharding/merging. If LB is sitting between user and Jitsu, events of same user might be coming to different machines

I believe that the best way to deal with that would be a) sending data to S3 with Jitsu b) writing a Spark job that processes the data and sends the updated events to Jitsu. The real-time aspect of Jitsu will be lost, but anyway it will do a better job comparing to writing an in-house merger

[viggin543]

@vklimontovich
With a db Like clickhouse that does not support UPDATE statements I see your Point.

But with a db like redshift or snowflake this can be achieved by only storing unique anonymous user ids in redis.
And on user recognition:

• finish loading all anonymous user events
• run an update statement ( that will set user details on the anonymous events )

Or do I miss something ?

I Believe that retroactive user recognition is inherently something that should not be real time

"retroactive" -> after the fact

That's my intuition.

[vklimontovich]

It's time to revisit this given a new architecture of Jitsu Next and the fact that we use Mongo as an underlying storage for user recognition. Here's a preliminary design:

• We still should use Mongo as Identity Graph store, and maybe list of <message id, timestamp>, but not whole event
• Once match has been found, user-recognition function should send a specially formated event that instructs Bulker to update certain fields in a table
• Bulker should support update operation by a certain criteria ob by a set of messages

We should think through design in details, generally speaking it's easy to do if the database allows to pull events by id