haproxy does not make use of all available vcpus

[Andrea Ieri]

[already filed upstream as https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2007213 - re-filing here for internal tracking]

HAproxy >= 1.8 offers a nbthread option to configure how many threads the haproxy process will use[0]. Scaling beyond 1 thread is useful as it is known to improve performance in busy loadbalancers, especially when doing TLS termination.

Octavia does not however configure nbthread, and as a result amphorae with more than one vcpu at their disposal do not perform any better than those with a single core available.

As a workaround, admins can provide a fully custom haproxy Jinja template via the haproxy_template octavia.conf option[1], but since templates are shared by all loadbalancers and their rendering is performed by the octavia server, this effectively forces the cloud admin to choose a single (nova) flavor for all their loadbalancers.

I propose for the default haproxy.cfg templates to be modified to include setting the nbthread option automatically to the number of vcpus a specific amphora has. The parameter could then optionally be exposed via the octavia API to allow operators to override it (via the octaviaclient and Horizon).

Note: the behavior described above aligns with what HAproxy 2.0 already does automatically[2][3]. HAproxy 2.0 is however not available in Ubuntu Bionic + OpenStack Stein, and - if I understand correctly - it will only be part of Openstack from Ussuri onward.

Note: nbthread is not supported by HAproxy < 1.8, and the haproxy process refuses to start if it finds unknown config keys. We would therefore need to also have a mechanism to prevent pushing this config option to amphorae using older haproxies (e.g. Ubuntu Xenial + OpenStack Queens). The manual override mentioned above could be a potential workaround.

[0] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/multithreading-in-haproxy/
[1] https://docs.openstack.org/octavia/ocata/main/configref.html#haproxy_amphora.haproxy_template
[2] https://cbonte.github.io/haproxy-dconv/2.0/configuration.html#nbthread
[3] on supported platforms, and tested to be true in Ubuntu 20.04