#8567 started a span for every background process. This is good as it means all Synapse code that gets run should be in a span (unless in the sentinel logging context), but it means we generate about 15x the number of spans as we did previously.
This PR attempts to reduce that number by a) not starting one for send commands to Redis, and b) deferring starting background processes until after we're sure they're necessary.
I don't really know how much this will help.
It turns out that looping_call does check the deferred returned by its
callback, and (at least in the case of client_ips), we were relying on this,
and I broke it in #3604.
Update run_as_background_process to return the deferred, and make sure we
return it to clock.looping_call.
This introduces a mechanism for tracking resource usage by background
processes, along with an example of how it will be used.
This will help address #3518, but more importantly will give us better insights
into things which are happening but not being shown up by the request metrics.
We *could* do this with Measure blocks, but:
- I think having them pulled out as a completely separate metric class will
make it easier to distinguish top-level processes from those which are
nested.
- I want to be able to report on in-flight background processes, and I don't
think we want to do this for *all* Measure blocks.
Patrick Cloke