Start fewer opentracing spans (#8640)

#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.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/synapse/logging/opentracing.py b/synapse/logging/opentracing.py
index e58850faff..ab586c318c 100644
--- a/synapse/logging/opentracing.py
+++ b/synapse/logging/opentracing.py
@@ -317,7 +317,7 @@ def ensure_active_span(message, ret=None):
 
 
 @contextlib.contextmanager
-def _noop_context_manager(*args, **kwargs):
+def noop_context_manager(*args, **kwargs):
     """Does exactly what it says on the tin"""
     yield
 
@@ -413,7 +413,7 @@ def start_active_span(
     """
 
     if opentracing is None:
-        return _noop_context_manager()
+        return noop_context_manager()
 
     return opentracing.tracer.start_active_span(
         operation_name,
@@ -428,7 +428,7 @@ def start_active_span(
 
 def start_active_span_follows_from(operation_name, contexts):
     if opentracing is None:
-        return _noop_context_manager()
+        return noop_context_manager()
 
     references = [opentracing.follows_from(context) for context in contexts]
     scope = start_active_span(operation_name, references=references)
@@ -459,7 +459,7 @@ def start_active_span_from_request(
     # Also, twisted uses byte arrays while opentracing expects strings.
 
     if opentracing is None:
-        return _noop_context_manager()
+        return noop_context_manager()
 
     header_dict = {
         k.decode(): v[0].decode() for k, v in request.requestHeaders.getAllRawHeaders()
@@ -497,7 +497,7 @@ def start_active_span_from_edu(
     """
 
     if opentracing is None:
-        return _noop_context_manager()
+        return noop_context_manager()
 
     carrier = json_decoder.decode(edu_content.get("context", "{}")).get(
         "opentracing", {}