I'm trying to implement a service worker in an application, but I wanted to ensure it's very resilient. I'm making sure the whole application only runs once the service worker is ready, which is generally working fine.
But when something happens during the service worker installation - like the user losing internet connection, it seems like my service worker gets stuck in the trying to install step. Only being installed after a couple of retries. I expect it to be installed as soon as the user reconnects and reloads the first time.
Is my expectation reasonable? Shouldn't the sw just resume installing in the next time the user loads the page?
Notice that this is a very rough prototype.
Related
Do server-less functions install modules every time they are called?
I am trying to understand how serverless functions really work. I understand that serverfull is basically a computer that executes code and that the server code runs on it 24/7 unless it is stopped for some reason. On the other hand I understand serverless code just runs when it is called. Where is this code stored? When I call a function in a serverless application does it install the modules (for example from npm) everytime I call the function? Is this what causes cold-start delays?
I understand that serverfull is like my computer running code. How can I describe serverless using the same analogy?
My Questions:
Do server-less functions install modules every time they are called?
If there is no server, where is this code stored in serverless?
I understand that serverfull is like my computer running code. How can I describe serverless using the same analogy?
No, the dependencies are a part of the deployment artifact (e.g. a ZIP file or container image in the case of AWS Lambda), so they do not have to be installed on each invocation.
I understand that serverfull is like my computer running code. How can I describe serverless using the same analogy?
That's not going to be a perfect explanation, but hopefully, it fits your analogy. Imagine that your computer is sleeping, but there's another computer that can receive requests and wake up your computer whenever it receives a new one, so it can be run on your computer. After it finishes running, it goes back to sleep. But instead of a single computer, there are many of them that can be brought from sleep in a matter of milliseconds. Hope that makes sense.
I deployed a Vue.js and a Kotlin server app. Cloud Run does promise to put a service to sleep if no request to it arise for a specific time. I did not opened my app for a day now. As I opened it - it was available almost immediatly. Since I know how long it takes to spin up when started locally I kinda don't trust the promise that Cloud Run really had put the app to sleep and span it up so crazy fast.
I'd love to know a way how I can really see how long it took for the spinup - also for startup improvement for the backend service.
After having the service inactive for some time, record the time when you request the service URL and request it.
Then go to the logs for the Cloud Run service, and use this filter to see the logs for the service:
resource.type="cloud_run_revision"
resource.labels.service_name="$SERVICE_NAME"
Look for the log entry with the normal app output after your request, check its time and compare it with the recorded time.
You can't know when the instance will be evicted or if it is kept in memory. It could happen quickly, or take hours or days before eviction. it's "serverless".
About the starting time, when I test, I deploy a new revision and I have a try on it. In the logging service, the first log entry of the new revision provides me the cold start duration. (Usually 300+ ms, compare to usual 20 - 50 ms with warm start).
The billing instance time is the sum of all the containers running times. A container is considered as "running" when it process request(s).
Im trying to understand the difference between skipWaiting and clientsClaim. In my understanding: calling skipWaiting will cause the new service worker to skip the waiting phase, and become active right away. clientsClaim can then 'claim' any other open tabs as well.
What I gather from documentation online:
skipWaiting skips the waiting phase, and becomes active right away source
clientsClaim immediately start controlling pages source
In every post I find online, I usually always see clientsClaim and skipWaiting used together.
However, I recently found a service worker that only uses clientsClaim, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what actually is the difference between clientsClaim and skipWaiting, and in what scenario do you use clientsClaim but not skipWaiting?
My thinking on this, and this may be where I'm wrong, but this is my understanding of it:
Is that calling clientsClaim, but not skipWaiting is redundant? Considering:
The new service worker will become active when all open pages are closed (because we're not using skipWaiting)
When our new service worker is activated, we call clientsClaim, even though we just closed all open pages to even activate the new service worker. There should be no other pages to control, because we just closed them.
Could someone help me understand?
Read documentation on skipWaiting
Read documentation on clientsClaim
Read about service worker lifecycle by Jake Archibald, and played around with this demo
Read a bunch of stackoverflow posts, offline cookbook, different blog posts, etc.
self.skipWaiting() does exactly what you described:
forces the waiting service worker to become the active service
"Active" in this sense does not mean any currently loaded clients are now talking to that service. It instead means that service is now the service to be used whenever a new client requests it.
This is where Clients.claim() comes in:
When a service worker is initially registered, pages won't use it until they next load.
Without calling claim, any existing clients will still continue to talk to the older service worker until a full page load.
While most of the time it makes sense to use skipWaiting and Clients.claim in conjunction, that is not always the case. If there is a chance of a poor experience for the user due to a service worker not being backwards compatible, Clients.claim should not be called. Instead, the next time a client is refreshed or loaded, it would now have the new service worker without worry of the breaking change.
The difference between skipWaiting() and Clients.claim() in Service Workers
An important concept to understand is that for a service worker to become operational on a page it must be the controller of the page. (You can actually see this property in Navigator.serviceWorker.controller.) To become the controller, the service worker must first be activated, but that's not enough in itself. A page can only be controlled if it has also been requested through a service worker.
Normally, this is the case, particularly if you're just updating a service worker. If, on the other hand, you're registering a service worker for the first time on a page, then the service worker will be installed and activated but it will not become the controller of the page because the page was not requested through a service worker.
You can fix this by calling Clients.claim() somewhere in the activate handler. This simply means that you wont have to refresh the page before you see the effects of the service worker.
There's some question as to how useful this actually is. Jake Archibald, one of the authors of the spec, has this to say about it:
I see a lot of people including clients.claim() as boilerplate, but I rarely do so myself. It only really matters on the very first load, and due to progressive enhancement the page is usually working happily without service worker anyway.
As regarding its use with other tabs, it will again only have any effect if those tabs were not requested through a service worker. It's possible to have a scenario where a user has the same page open in different tabs and has these tabs open for a long period of time, during which the developer introduces a service worker. If the user refreshes one tab but not the other, one tab will have the service worker and the other will not. But this scenario seems somewhat uncommon.
skipWaiting()
A service worker is activated after it is installed, and if there is no other service worker that is currently controlling pages within the scope. In other words, if you have any number of tabs open for a page that is being controlled by the old service worker, then the new service worker will not activate. You can therefore activate the new service worker by closing all open tabs. After this, the old service worker is controlling zero pages, and so the new service worker can become active.
If you don’t want to wait for the old service worker to be killed, you can call skipWaiting(). Normally, this is done within the install event handler. Even if the old service worker is controlling pages, it is killed anyway and this allows the new service worker to be activated.
To immediately activate a service worker after it's installed, I use self.skipWaiting() in the install listener. To immediately take control of a page (without the need for a page navigation, e.g. page load), I use self.clients.claim(). I understand that doing such things means:
Page could first load without it being under the control of a Service Worker, but then be taken over by a Service Worker during its lifespan.
A page could start under the control of version 1 of Service Worker but then be taken over by version 2 during its lifespan.
There are all kinds of warnings online about doing such things, but I don't see the pitfalls. Perhaps one potential problem is if the controlled page does some initial handshake or setup with a Service Worker when it first loads. That obviously will be missed when the new Service Worker activates in the background, but even then, the Service Worker could message its controlling pages to notify them of the change.
It seems to me that for most applications under most scenarios would benefit significantly by using both self.skipWaiting() and self.clients.claim() without any downside. Did I miss something?
The pitfalls of self.skipWaiting() is described really well here (thanks #RobertRowntree for the link):
https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-the-refresh-button-when-using-service-workers-a8e27af6df68
As for self.clients.claim(), I still haven't seen a compelling argument against it, but when I do, I'll update my answer.
I have written several services in Delphi now, but I want to add the facility of auto updating the service either from a LAN unc path or from a http server. I have been pondering this and I am interested to hear peoples ideas. I can create a thread that will check for the update periodically, but how do I go about stopping the service uninstalling and installing automatically. My initial thoughts where to write a console app to do this and start it using create process, then let the service stop and the console app do the work, starting the new version of the service before it exits. Is this a good stratergy or shoul I consider something else. Thanks in advance
I do as you suggest. A thread checks occasionally for an update. If it is present, it downloads it and puts it into an appropriate place. It then verifies that it is wholesome (don't want it to be broken!). Finally, the thread then launches another app with parameters to tell it what to do, specifically, the name of the service, the location of the file to replace, and the file to replace it with. Then the service just waits.
When the updater app starts, it pauses a moment to make sure that the service is all stable, and then it uses the service control API to stop the service. It then monitors it until it is gone. Finally, it pauses a little to ensure that Windows has really finished with the file. Then it starts the process of renaming the old file to move it out of the way (if still in use, it retries a few times), and then copying the new file into place. And finally, it starts the service up again. Then the updater quits.
This has worked quite reliably for my services, and also standalone apps too (with different parameters for the updater app to know which mode). And if you are careful, you can update the updater using the exact same system, which is nice to watch.
I would have the service be a shell that only updates another executable or DLL file where the real code is at.
Have some communication method between the shell and the child process to force a shutdown and then have the shell perform the upgrade and relaunch the child.
As a side note, this makes debugging the service much easier as well as you'll be able to run the child process directly without having to worry about the extra efforts required to debug windows services.
your idea seems very good to me, however take this into consideration aswell:
- add module(the main core) to the service that will be unloaded and will load the updated module(*.dll file) when an update is available -- in this time the service should put the "tasks" in a queue or something...
additionally you can use plugins and/or scripts like Pascal script or DWScript
Last versions of Windows (I think since windows 10) does not allow a service to start other programs. So you will need an other program to run the update. It could be an other service.
Windows Services cannot start additional applications because they are
not running in the context of any particular user. Unlike regular
Windows applications, services are now run in an isolated session and
are prohibited from interacting with a user or the desktop.