Fix deployment watchers to avoid creating unnecessary deployment watcher goroutines and blocking queries. `deploymentWatcher.getAllocsCh` creates a new goroutine that makes a blocking query to fetch updates of deployment allocs.
## Background
When operators submit a new or updated service job, Nomad create a new deployment by default. The deployment object controls how fast to place the allocations through [`max_parallel`](https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/job-specification/update#max_parallel) and health checks configurations.
The `scheduler` and `deploymentwatcher` package collaborate to achieve deployment logic: The scheduler only places the canaries and `max_parallel` allocations for a new deployment; the `deploymentwatcher` monitors for alloc progress and then enqueues a new evaluation whenever the scheduler should reprocess a job and places the next `max_parallel` round of allocations.
The `deploymentwatcher` package makes blocking queries against the state store, to fetch all deployments and the relevant allocs for each running deployments. If `deploymentwatcher` fails or is hindered from fetching the state, the deployments fail to make progress.
`Deploymentwatcher` logic only runs on the leader.
## Why unnecessary deployment watchers can halt cluster progress
Previously, `getAllocsCh` is called on every for loop iteration in `deploymentWatcher.watch()` function. However, the for-loop may iterate many times before the allocs get updated. In fact, whenever a new deployment is created/updated/deleted, *all* `deploymentWatcher`s get notified through `w.deploymentUpdateCh`. The `getAllocsCh` goroutines and blocking queries spike significantly and grow quadratically with respect to the number of running deployments. The growth leads to two adverse outcomes:
1. it spikes the CPU/Memory usage resulting potentially leading to OOM or very slow processing
2. it activates the [query rate limiter](abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployment_watcher.go (L896-L898)), so later the watcher fails to get updates and consequently fails to make progress towards placing new allocations for the deployment!
So the cluster fails to catch up and fails to make progress in almost all deployments. The cluster recovers after a leader transition: the deposed leader stops all watchers and free up goroutines and blocking queries; the new leader recreates the watchers without the quadratic growth and remaining under the rate limiter. Well, until a spike of deployments are created triggering the condition again.
### Relevant Code References
Path for deployment monitoring:
* [`Watcher.watchDeployments`](abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployments_watcher.go (L164-L192)) loops waiting for deployment updates.
* On every deployment update, [`w.getDeploys`](abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployments_watcher.go (L194-L229)) returns all deployments in the system
* `watchDeployments` calls `w.add(d)` on every active deployment
* which in turns, [updates existing watcher if one is found](abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployments_watcher.go (L251-L255)).
* The deployment watcher [updates local local deployment field and trigger `deploymentUpdateCh` channel]( abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployment_watcher.go (L136-L147))
* The [deployment watcher `deploymentUpdateCh` selector is activated](abaa9c5c5b/nomad/deploymentwatcher/deployment_watcher.go (L455-L489)). Most of the time the selector clause is a no-op, because the flow was triggered due to another deployment update
* The `watch` for-loop iterates again and in the previous code we create yet another goroutine and blocking call that risks being rate limited.
Co-authored-by: Tim Gross <tgross@hashicorp.com>
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