Word Count Over Internet

Introduction

Hierarchically cached word counter over the public internet page(HTML document), exposed as an API via gRPC service.

This program access a specific location in the web and count a word in HTML document. Except,

• when user asks internal resource like file://etc/fstab or https://cluster.local
• when user asks too big page such as https://download.ubuntu.org/installation_image.iso
• (check simplewc/simplewc/tests/test_security.py for more cases.)

Internally, this program reuses and caches many parts including most recent results and recently acquired HTML documentations.

• You can call the API on same HTML resource multiple times. It will generate only one HTML documentation download from the target public web host in most cases.
  • You can request multiple word counts on a single document. The results will be streamed to you.
• Most recent accessed query and past retrieved HTML documents can have separate data storages so you can have cheap storage as a documentation storage and in-memory cache server as a request cache server

Internal Structure Overview

1. Transport Layer
   • gRPC
2. Service Layer
   • gRPC servicer implementation using our model
3. Data Model Layer
   • class HTMLDocument
4. Data storage layer
   • Multiple databases

How to test

Unit test

Have a pytest

> python -m pip install pytest

Run tests

> python -m pytest

To write additional unittest, please note we provide MockDocumentStorage and MockQueryCache

Regression

• Deploy test DBs
  • Insecure Redis running at localhost:50001
  • Insecure MongoDB running at localhost:27017
• Install package (or set PYTHONPATH/pipenv/venv if you wish)

  > pip install ./simplewc

• Run server program

  > python -m simplewc

• (in another context/terminal,) Run example_client

  > python simplewc/simplewc/example_client.py  

TODO: regression tests can be included in test.

How to use

Use gRPC service rpc CountWords (WordCountRequest) returns (stream WordCount) in your favorite language.

• CountWords returns gRPC stream of WordCount
• WordCountRequest contains one URI to the HTML document and word(s) to count
• WordCount contains one URI, one word, and its appearance
• Error code and messages are handled in gRPC standard error code

Example client script is provided in simplewc/simplewc/example_client.py.

The simplest example would be,

channel = grpc.insecure_channel(f'localhost:50051')
stub = WordCountServiceStub(channel)
response_stream = stub.CountWords(WordCountRequest(
    uri='https://virtusize.jp', words=['fit', 'size', 'virtusize']))
for r in response_stream:
    print(f'\tAt {r.uri}, word {r.word} appears {r.count} time(s)')

API

API is provided in a form of gRPC rpc.

/* WordCountService services word counting based on WordCountRequest message.
 * * Note on caching:
 *     - The implementation of this service may contain internal caching on
 *       HTML document.
 *     - Request multiple word count in a single uri rather than calling
 *       any services multiple times. */
service WordCountService {
    /* Service each word's occurrence in a certain uri.
     * If error happens, it will cut a stream and send gRPC error code with
     * detailed message instead of WordCount stream */
    rpc CountWords (WordCountRequest) returns (stream WordCount);
}

Message

messages are provided in a form of protobuf message. For the details, please refer to proto file at simplewc/simplewc/protos/wc.proto, which looks like ...

/* WordCountRequest represents a word count query. You can specify multiple
 *  words at the same time */
message WordCountRequest {
    string uri = 1;
    repeated string words = 2;
}

/* WordCount represents a word and a occurrence of it in uri */
message WordCount {
    string word = 1;
    string uri = 2;
    uint32 count = 3;
}

The example client runs as follows: ```text Try to find 3 different words in a URL At https://virtusize.jp, word fit appears 4 time(s) At https://virtusize.jp, word size appears 0 time(s) At https://virtusize.jp, word virtusize appears 4 time(s)

Try to find nothing
    No word found


Inaccessible host: non existing https://virtusize.co.jp
    RPC Error <_Rendezvous of RPC that terminated with:
    status = StatusCode.INTERNAL
    details = "We could not reach a server of requested URI"
    debug_error_string = "{"created":"@1553340540.602000000","description":"Error received from peer","file":"src/core/lib/surface/call.cc","file_line":1039,"grpc_message":"We could not reach a server of requested URI","grpc_status":13}"
>


Inaccessible host: 127.0.0.1
    RPC Error <_Rendezvous of RPC that terminated with:
    status = StatusCode.PERMISSION_DENIED
    details = "You cannot access Local URI"
    debug_error_string = "{"created":"@1553340540.603000000","description":"Error received from peer","file":"src/core/lib/surface/call.cc","file_line":1039,"grpc_message":"You cannot access Local URI","grpc_status":7}"
>


Inaccessible host: file:///etc/apt/sources.list
    RPC Error <_Rendezvous of RPC that terminated with:
    status = StatusCode.PERMISSION_DENIED
    details = "You can only access ('http', 'https') protocol"
    debug_error_string = "{"created":"@1553340540.604000000","description":"Error received from peer","file":"src/core/lib/surface/call.cc","file_line":1039,"grpc_message":"You can only access ('http', 'https') protocol","grpc_status":7}"
>

```

How it works

1. User send a request, (uri, multiple words)
2. Check if it's safe request
3. Open a stream
4. In every word,
   • Check if a (uri/word) combination is in result cache
     • Do not update TTL of cache. Return the result
   • If not, check local memory if we already loaded a HTML document.
     • If we have a document in local memory, return the result and update query cache
     • If not, check document storage in local network,
       • If we have a document in a storage, update recent query cache and return the result
       • If we don't even have it, get it over the internet
         • Store both HTML document and recent result
5. Close a stream if,
   • Met the last result
   • Found an error
     • Send error code and detailed message

How to run

As we are not using authentication, use simplewc.servicer:serve_insecure. you may want to refer to simplewc/simplewc/__main__.py for the test purpose server launch.

• Requirements
  • Insecure Redis running at localhost:50001
  • Insecure MongoDB running at localhost:27017

Modify simplewc.config to configure these

Also, MockDocumentStorage and MockQueryCache are provided to run without Redis and MongoDB.

How to deploy

Currently Helm package, compose file, or even Dockerfile is not provided. I don't expect you to use this in production. But if you are interested...

Configuration

Currently this program is configured via Python file. simplewc.config is configured as,

ALLOWED_PROTOCOLS = ('http', 'https')
MAX_CONTENT_SIZE = 2 ** (10 + 10 + 4)  # 16.0 MiB
MAX_GRPC_SERVER_THREADS = 16
INSECURE_HOST = 'localhost'
INSECURE_PORT = 50001

REDIS_HOST = 'localhost'
REDIS_PORT = 6379
REDIS_DB = 0
CACHE_EXPIRE = '600'

MONGO_HOST = 'localhost'
MONGO_PORT = 27017
MONGO_DB = 'wc_doc_cache'
MONGO_COLLECTION = 'wc_doc_collection'
MONGO_TTL = 3600

You may want to edit this with getenv, such as getenv('REDIS_HOST'), to configure with env file. Or edit directly in build time for the immutable infrastructure pattern.

Internal communication security and privileges

Currently this program expects insecure internal communication. We don't expect privilege check on databases.

For example, Redis singleton is created as the following.

RedisQueryCache(REDIS_HOST, REDIS_PORT, REDIS_DB)

RedisQueryCache class (and MongoDB too) has extra options to configure security. Update this to secure internal connections

How to build proto file into python file

Prepare grpc_tools and mypy-protobuf on your dev environment, then

> python -m grpc_tools.protoc -Isimplewc/simplewc/protos --python_out=simplewc/simplewc/protos --grpc_python_out=simplewc/simplewc/
protos --mypy_out=simplewc/simplewc/protos  wc.proto

, on Windows, add

--plugin=protoc-gen-mypy=path\to\mypy-protobuf\python\protoc_gen_mypy.bat 

Limitations

1. If encoding is not specified in HTML, this only works with UTF-8 encoded pages.
   • We can improve with encoding guessing. There are good oss implementations such as cchardet
2. User only can find a word maximum length of 4MB

Design choices

1. Web page cache

   • Counting all the words and one word takes same time complexity, O(n).
     • So we save all word count of a document
     • Average HTML document size is ~ 30KB
       • Google expects 60 Billions web page exist
         • We can cache 0.00005% of web pages per 1 GB.
           • We can store 1% of web pages only with 20TB storage
           • But we are not building Google scale API here.
           • Or, we can store ~ 2 Million web pages for 64GB of storage
         • it takes ~60 seconds to fill up 64 GB storage with 10G internet connection, w/o any overhead.
           • But, HTML document size may vary greatly by each web pages, thus let's create a strategy to expire data to maintain 50% usage of disk
           • Minimum lifetime of each cache record will be (storage size)/ (internet speed)
             • NOTE: (bytes) / (bytes/time) = time
           • Maximum lifetime of each cache record must be set by the user
           • To maintain the cache size ~ storage size/2,
             • as (v_create - v_expire) * dt = delta_storage, we can solve ODE
             • or in a very rough approximation, we can use ((1-t) max - t min), where t = min(current storage usage / (storage size/2), 1)

2. Query result cache

   • Each record will take ~ 4KB (1KB of URL, 1KB of word, 4bytes of count + overhead)
     • We can save ~4 millions of query result in 16GB memory.
     • We can set the TTL of cache, and keep them in LRU fashion.

3. Choice of Database Solution

   • Web page cache
     • Cheap storage(disk-based), TTL supported, document database: MongoDB
   • Query result cache
     • In-memory, fast membership check, LRU support: Redis