headroom/tests/test_litellm_upstream_timeout.py
Tejas Chopra f624d3a00a
perf(proxy): bound upstream calls and hot-path costs (#2852)
Seven commits from one week of load testing: one hang, two request-path
correctness fixes, and four hot-path costs that only show up in
production.

## Reliability

**Bound every upstream call.** The litellm backend had no timeout at
all, so a
request the upstream never answered blocked its caller forever. Observed
under
load on 2026-08-07: four agent workers on ESTABLISHED connections for
36+
minutes while `/readyz` answered in 0.11s. No error, no retry, no log
line —
indistinguishable from slow work, which is the worst shape a failure can
take.

A float rather than an `httpx.Timeout`, deliberately: litellm expands a
float
across all four httpx phases, so on a streaming call it becomes the
maximum gap
*between chunks*, not a cap on total generation. A long answer streaming
steadily is never cut off; a stalled one dies. Default 600s via
`HEADROOM_UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT`; 0, negative, and junk fall back to the
default
rather than meaning "no timeout".

**Keep the consistency re-count off the event loop.** It ran
`tokenizer.count_messages` twice directly on the loop. Since Claude
counting
moved to a real BPE that is CPU-bound work stalling every other
in-flight
request — ~1s on a 2.3 MB body, with `/healthz` gaps tracking body size.
Offloaded via `asyncio.to_thread` on the same tokenizer instance, so
reported
values are unchanged. (#2810)

**Survive a re-parse MemoryError.** `MemoryError` is not a `ValueError`,
so on
1M-context payloads the byte-faithful forwarder's verification re-parse
escaped
the handler and aborted an otherwise-fine request — 14 aborts across 8
days of
reporter logs. (#2768)

## Performance

All four are measured, not guessed. Each degrades with something a short
benchmark does not vary: uptime, content shape, or process age.

| fix | before | after |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-record walk per request (at 100k records) | 13.6 ms | bounded by
model count |
| JSON-block scan, JS-style object logs (1200 lines) | 4643 ms | 183 ms
|
| JSON-block scan, truncated JSONL | 3737 ms | 116 ms |
| Lazy imports inside user requests | multi-second | paid at startup |
| `count_text` (80% of local CPU) | — | memoised |

Two worth calling out:

- **The cost walk degrades with proxy *uptime*, not load.** A freshly
started
proxy pays ~0.01 ms; a month-old one pays 4–13 ms on every request, on
the
event loop, holding the metrics lock. Deliberately not a TTL cache over
`stats()`: those values feed `check_budget()` when `--budget` is set,
and a
stale reading under-enforces the budget. The fix is to stop computing
what
  the caller discards.
- **The JSON-block memo is built only *after* a scan fails to balance.**
That
ordering is load-bearing, not an optimisation — caching from the start
made
pretty-printed JSON ~2x slower, since content that balances on the first
scan
  has nothing to reuse and just pays the per-line dict traffic. Still a
  constant-factor fix, not an asymptotic one.

## Tests

+1202 lines, 20 files. Each fix is pinned by a test that fails on the
unmodified code: the re-count test asserts no `count_messages` pass runs
with a
live event loop in its thread; the re-parse test drives a `MemoryError`
through
the real request path and expects a 200; `totals()` equality with
`stats()` is
asserted across model counts, request volumes, and both pricing
branches. The
timeout test is structural rather than a mock — the failure mode is a
dispatch
path someone adds later without a guard, which mocking the existing four
cannot
catch.

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-09 16:24:33 -07:00

70 lines
2.4 KiB
Python

"""Every upstream call must be bounded.
There was no timeout in this backend at all. Observed 2026-08-07 under load:
four agent workers blocked on ESTABLISHED connections for 36+ minutes while
the proxy answered /readyz in 0.11s. No error, no retry, no log line -- the
caller simply stops, forever, and that is indistinguishable from slow work.
"""
from __future__ import annotations
import ast
from pathlib import Path
import pytest
from headroom.backends.litellm import (
DEFAULT_UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT,
UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT_ENV,
_upstream_timeout,
)
_SRC = Path(__file__).resolve().parents[1] / "headroom" / "backends" / "litellm.py"
def test_every_acompletion_call_is_bounded():
"""A new dispatch path added without a timeout reintroduces the hang.
Checked structurally rather than by mocking, because the failure mode is a
call site someone ADDS later -- which no mock of the existing paths sees.
"""
tree = ast.parse(_SRC.read_text())
calls, guards = 0, 0
for node in ast.walk(tree):
if not isinstance(node, ast.Call):
continue
fn = node.func
if isinstance(fn, ast.Name) and fn.id == "acompletion":
calls += 1
if (
isinstance(fn, ast.Attribute)
and fn.attr == "setdefault"
and node.args
and isinstance(node.args[0], ast.Constant)
and node.args[0].value == "timeout"
):
guards += 1
assert calls > 0, "no acompletion call sites found -- test is stale"
assert guards >= calls, (
f"{calls} acompletion call site(s) but only {guards} timeout guard(s); "
"an unbounded upstream call blocks its caller forever"
)
def test_a_junk_env_value_cannot_disable_the_timeout(monkeypatch):
"""`0` means 'no timeout' to httpx, i.e. exactly the bug. So does junk."""
for bad in ("", "0", "-1", "nonsense", "None"):
monkeypatch.setenv(UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT_ENV, bad)
assert _upstream_timeout() == DEFAULT_UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT, bad
def test_an_operator_can_still_tune_it(monkeypatch):
monkeypatch.setenv(UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT_ENV, "42.5")
assert _upstream_timeout() == pytest.approx(42.5)
def test_the_default_is_generous_enough_for_real_work():
"""Streaming: litellm expands a float across all httpx phases, so this is
the max gap BETWEEN CHUNKS, not a cap on total generation. A steady long
answer is never cut off."""
assert 60.0 <= DEFAULT_UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT <= 1800.0