Jef Claes

On software and life

16 Nov 2014

Hot aggregate detection using F#

Last week, I wrote about splitting a hot aggregate. Discovering that specific hot aggregate was easy; it would cause transactional failures from time to time.

Long-lived hot aggregates often are an indication of a missing concept and an opportunity for teasing things apart. Last week, I took one long-lived hot aggregate and pulled smaller short-lived hot aggregates out, identifying two missing concepts.

Hunting for more hot aggregates, I could visualize event streams and use my eyes to detect bursts of activity, or I could have a little function analyze the event streams for me.

Looking at an event stream, we can identify a hot aggregate by having a lot of events in a short window of time.

Let’s say that when six events occur within five seconds from each other, we’re dealing with a hot aggregate.

[<Test>]
member this.``Given a hot aggregate, a hot aggregate will be detected``() = 
	let treshold = 4
	let secondsInWindow = 5		   
	let eventStream = createEventStream [0; 1; 2; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 60; 90]
	   
	streamIsHot eventStream treshold secondsInWindow |> should equal true

What I came up with is a function that folds over an event stream. It will walk over each event, maintaining the time window, allowing us to look back in time. When the window size exceeds the treshold, the event stream will be identified as hot. Once identified, the remaining events won’t be analyzed.

let streamIsHot (events : seq<Event>) treshold secondsInWindow =      
	let folder acc e =         
		let detect acc e = 
			let windowFilter = (fun x -> x >= e.Timestamp.AddSeconds(- float secondsInWindow))
			let window = e.Timestamp :: acc.Window |> List.filter windowFilter
			let hot = (window |> Seq.length) > treshold
			{ acc with Hot = hot; Window = window }

		match acc.Hot with 
			| true -> acc
			| false -> detect acc e   
			
	(Seq.fold folder initialDetectionResult events).Hot