Skip to main content

Bcrypt and slow tests

We use Bcrypt hash to encrypt user's password. One of the strength of bcrypt is that its inherently slow to compute the hash and that makes the brute force breaking of password almost impossible.  But I recently ran into an interesting issue where almost overnight the build times on jenkins blow up from 12 mins to 22 mins and the build engineer complained about bulk user testcase as the culprit.

I ran it locally and found that the class had close to 15 tests and each test method was taking 20 sec and all I see is in setup we were creating 5 users and deleting 5 users in teardown.  So as usual best way to debug a performance problem is to look at the thread dump. I did a ps -ef on the running build and did a kill -QUIT to print the thread dump and immediately I saw time spent in Bcrypt computation. I took 3-4 more thread dump and all of them were stuck on bcrypt.  So I did two things:

1) I saw many methods in the test class that were testing pure validations and didnt needed the creation/deletion of users. So I moved them to a new Unit test class.
2) I added a JVM property to skip Bcrypt computation during user creation and passed that as a jvm argument to ant test target. This is to prevent not the skip in the prod environment.

And voila the build times were back to 13 mins.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RabbitMQ java clients for beginners

Here is a sample of a consumer and producer example for RabbitMQ. The steps are Download Erlang Download Rabbit MQ Server Download Rabbit MQ Java client jars Compile and run the below two class and you are done. This sample create a Durable Exchange, Queue and a Message. You will have to start the consumer first before you start the for the first time. For more information on AMQP, Exchanges, Queues, read this excellent tutorial http://blogs.digitar.com/jjww/2009/01/rabbits-and-warrens/ +++++++++++++++++RabbitMQProducer.java+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ import com.rabbitmq.client.Connection; import com.rabbitmq.client.Channel; import com.rabbitmq.client.*; public class RabbitMQProducer { public static void main(String []args) throws Exception { ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactory(); factory.setUsername("guest"); factory.setPassword("guest"); factory.setVirtualHost("/"); factory.setHost("127.0.0.1"); factory.se...
23 comments
Read more

Jersey streaming binary data

In the previous post I showed how you can post binary data to a jersey REST api. You can also use Jersey to serve files, although its better done by apache or nginx but sometimes you might want to serve thumbnails stored in a database out of a service and put varnish in front of the REST api to cache the thumbnails. This is just a demonstration of using jersey to serve binary data in streaming fashion. @Path("/download-service") public class DownaloadService extends SecureRestService { private static final AppLogger logger = AppLogger.getLogger(DownaloadService.class); @POST @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM) public StreamingOutput getThumbnail( @FormParam("securityKey") final String securityKey, @FormParam("guid") final String guid) throws JSONException { return new StreamingOutput() { @Override public void write(OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { if (!isAuthorized(securityKey)) { response.sendErro...
12 comments
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...
7 comments
Read more