Configure app engine push task queue for twilio SMS verification - java

This question is a follow up to How to implement an atomic integer in Java App Engine?. Basically I am create a push Task Queue to implement SMS verification. I am using Twilio to send the SMS. Each SMS is a five digit pin number. The following is my queue.xml file for app-engine.
<queue-entries>
<queue>
<name>sms-verification</name>
<rate>200/s</rate>
<bucket-size>100</bucket-size>
<max-concurrent-requests>10</max-concurrent-requests>
</queue>
</queue-entries>
I want the best rate I can get without creating a new instance. I believe instance creation is expensive on app-engine, though I am not sure if it's the same for task queues. So is this configuration file good? Is it missing anything? This is my first time creating one so thanks for any guidance.

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. You will have to play with the configuration settings to get the optimal results for your requirements. You need to take the following into account:
You load throughout the day/week: more or less even or with sharp peaks.
Delay tolerance: how long it is acceptable to wait until the message is sent.
Obviously, it will be more expensive if you want to send all messages immediately, and less expensive if you can tolerate even a small delay (e.g. 1 minutes) as it would smooth out at least some sudden peaks.
Note that the higher the volume, the less important these optimizations become, as 1 new instance over 20 live is not as expensive as 1 new instance over 1.

Related

Discord bot - delay when sending messages [duplicate]

I want my discordbot to send send a message with an attached file in it and a text. Then the bot has to edit this text a couple of times but the problem is that when bot eddits message 5 times then it waits some time and then edits again 5 times etc etc. How can i make it edit messages without stopping?
if(msg.content.includes("letter")){
msg.channel.send("alphabet", { files: ["/Users/48602/Videos/discordbot/aaa.png"]})}
if(msg.content === 'alphabet'){
msg.edit("**a**")
msg.edit("**b**")
msg.edit("**c**")
msg.edit("**d**") // Here bot stop for a 2 seconds and i dont know why
msg.edit("**e**")
msg.edit("**f**")
msg.edit("**g**")
msg.edit("**h**")
msg.edit("**i**")
msg.edit("**j**")// Here bot stop for a 2 seconds and i dont know why
msg.edit("**k**")
msg.edit("**l**")
msg.edit("**m**")
msg.edit("**n**")
msg.edit("**o**") // Here bot stop for a 2 seconds and i dont know why
msg.delete()
}
Discord has a rate limit of 5 in each request. Trying to bypass this would be considered API abuse (the solutions later is not API abuse).
Exceeding this limit will pause other requests until a certain number of seconds has passed. Along with my research, I came across this simple explanation:
5 anything per 5 seconds per server (if you did not understand what I said above).
On Discord's Developer guide on rate limits, it tells you this:
There is currently a single exception to the above rule [rate limits] regarding different HTTP methods sharing the same rate limit, and that is for the deletion of messages. Deleting messages falls under a separate, higher rate limit so that bots are able to more quickly delete content from channels (which is useful for moderation bots).
One workaround, without API abusing, would be to send messages, and delete the previous messages since there is a higher limit for deleting messages.
Another workaround would be to add intermediate timeouts to your animation.
A simple method such as:
function async wait = { require("util").promisify(setTimeout); };
//syntax: await wait(1000); to "pause" for 1 second
You will need to play around with the timings so it fits your intended animation speed, and without pausing due to the rate limit.

How to delay the execution of a timed task for two or more years

In a microservice architecture, suppose there is a business scenario where a user purchases something that will expire after two years, and the system needs to notify the user a little bit in advance.
In this case, how should we handle the situation so that the users can be notified on time even if there are many users who need to be notified?
For example, using a delayed queue of message queue will cause the messages to pile up when there are many users; using a timed task, too many users will overload the server CPU.
Is there a good way to do this?
While "microservices" do not inherently mean "REST", they usually are. And in REST you shouldn't store in memory anything that needs to survive more than one request. Two years is an extreme case, but even if it is for just 10 minutes, it should probably go to the DB.
Building up a queue for two years will just be very impractical and likely to fail if the queue contents are not persisted somewhere. Since you mention purchases I am assuming you have some sort of data store to record them either in sql or no-sql.
You can simply add purchase date/time column(s) to the table to make life easier. If you volumes are low enough for daily purchases then I would start with date based lookup only. You will need a scheduled execution of some service method say at 6am everyday that looks up purchases close to expiry i.e 7 days before 2 years purchase_date = now - 723days and then send rest request somewhere or publishes an event or jms message with order number and purchase_date as content for each purchase order. This will then be picked up by event/message listener somewhere and processed accordingly i.e. send a notification to customer. To avoid sending duplicate notifications you should also persist the expiry notifications in a database and ensure you check that notification has been sent for purchase id before sending it again.
If you ever reach a situation where you are processing thousands of orders a day and don't want to publish large number of events in one go then extend the functionality to filter by purchase timestamp and process chunks of purchases multiple times a day by changing the lookup condition.
This is just general idea of such requirement and you will have to fine-grain a lot of implementation details such as what happens if your email server is down.
You can use quartz job and configure it to use persistent mode in database (JDBC JobStore) to not loose information and also it is suitable for clustering mode.
Quartz checks periodically the database for the nearest task (configurable parameter) if the time comes, it will process the notification.
You can configure the thread pool size in order to avoid overload.

Timeouts for multiple clients in Java

I have one Server and multiple clients. With some period, clients sends an alive packet to Server. (At this moment, Server doesn't respond alive packets). The period may change device to device and configurable at runtime, for both Server and Clients. I want to generate an alert when one or more clients doesn't send the alive packet. (One packet or two in row etc.). This aliveness is used other parts of application so the quicker notice is the better. I came up some ideas but I couldn't select one.
Create a task that checks every clients last alive packet timestamps with current time and generate alert or alerts. Call this method in some period which should be smaller than minimum client-period.
Actually that seems better to me, however this way unnecessarily I check some clients alive. (Ex: If clients period are change 1-5 minute, task should be run in every minute at least, so I check all clients above 2 minute period is redundant). Also if the minimum of client periods is decrease, I should decrease the tasks period also.
Create a task for each clients, and check the last alive packet timestamps with current time, sleep for one client's period time.
In this way, if clients number goes very high, there will be dozens of task. Since they will sleep most of the time, I still doubt this is more elegant.
Is there any idiom or pattern for this kind of situation? I think watchdog kind implementation is suite well, however I didn't see something like in Java.
Approach 2 is not very useful as it is vague idea to write 100 task for 100 clients.
Approach 1 can be optimized if you use average client-period instead of minimum.
It depends on your needs.
Is it critical if alert is generated few seconds later (or earlier) than it should be?
If not then maybe it's worth grouping clients with nearby heartbeat intervals and run the check against not a single client but the group of clients? This will allow to decrease number of tasks (100 -> 10) and increase number of clients handled by single task (1 -> 10).
First approach is fine.
Only thing I can suggest you is that create an independent service to do this control. If you set this task as a thread in your server, it wouldn't be that manageable. Imagine your control thread is broken, killed etc, how would you notice? So, build an independent OS service, another java program, to check last alive timestamps periodically.
In this way you can easily modify and restart your service and see its logs separately. According to its importance, you may even built a "watchdog of watchdog" service too.

How to implement an atomic integer in Java App Engine?

I am trying to roll out my own SMS verification system for my app. I don’t want to start paying for a service and then have them jack up the price on me (Urban Airship did that to me for push notification: lesson learned). During development and beta testing I have been using Twilio with a very basic setup: 1 phone number. It worked well for over a year, but right now for whatever reason the messages aren’t always delivered. In any case I need to create a better system for production. So I have the following specs in mind:
600 delivered SMS per minute
zero misses
save money
Right now my Twilio phone number can send one SMS per second; which means the best I can handle is 60 happy users per minute. So how do I get 600 happy users per minute?
So the obvious solution is to use 10 phone numbers. But how would I implement the system? My server is App Engine, DataStore, Java. So say I purchase 10 phone numbers from Twilio (fewer would of course be better). How do I implement the array so that it can handle concurrent calls from users? Will the following be sufficient?
public static final String[] phoneBank = {“1234567890”,”2345678901”,”3456789012”,”4567890123”,…};
public static volatile nextIndex;
public void sendSMSUsingTwilio(String message, String userPhone){
nextIndex = (nextIndex+1)%phoneBank.length;
String toPhone = phoneBank[nextIndex];
// boilerplate for sending sms with twilio goes here
//…
}
Now imagine 1000 users calling this function at the very same time. Would nextIndex run from 0,1,2…9,0,1…9,0,… successively until all requests are sent?
So really this is a concurrency problem. How will this concurrency issue work on Java AppEngine? Will there be interleaving? bottlenecking? I want this to be fast on a low budget: At least 600 per minute. So I definitely don’t want synchronization in the code itself to waste precious time. So how do I best synchronize calls to increment nextIndex so that the phone numbers are each called equally and in a periodic fashion? Again, this is for Google App Engine.
You need to use Task API. Every message is a new task, and you can assign phone numbers using round-robin or random assignments. As a task is completed, App Engine will automatically pull and execute the next task. You can configure the desired throughput rate (for example, 10 per second), and App Engine will manage the required capacity for you.
You can try to implement something similar on your own, but it's much more difficult than you think - you have to handle concurrency, retries, instance shutdowns, memory limits, etc. Task API does all of that for you.

Check database and receive android notification

I have a database with datas and my android application when it was launched checks if there is a new record in the database.
I created a Service and it checks every ten seconds if there is a new record and alert me with a notification.
I think it isn't the best solution cause it checks every ten seconds so it use the battery and internet every ten seconds.
Is there another solution to do that without check every ten seconds, for example, by using some code in my php form which add content in my database.
Thanks in advance.
You are right, there is plenty of solutions.
One of powerfull solutions is implementation of publish subscribe pattern.
In short: All subscribed clients will be notified on any change for which they are subscribed.
For quick info and start point use this link: https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/pubsub_messaging.
General about publish subscribe: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19798-01/821-1841/bnced/index.html

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