If an asynchronous signal is received outside of the poller, we don't
want the poller to wait for a timeout to occur before processing it,
so we set its timeout to zero, just like we do with pending tasks in
the run queue.
It should be stated as a rule that a C file should never
include types/xxx.h when proto/xxx.h exists, as it gives
less exposure to declaration conflicts (one of which was
caught and fixed here) and it complicates the file headers
for nothing.
Only types/global.h, types/capture.h and types/polling.h
have been found to be valid includes from C files.
This is the first attempt at moving all internal parts from
using struct timeval to integer ticks. Those provides simpler
and faster code due to simplified operations, and this change
also saved about 64 bytes per session.
A new header file has been added : include/common/ticks.h.
It is possible that some functions should finally not be inlined
because they're used quite a lot (eg: tick_first, tick_add_ifset
and tick_is_expired). More measurements are required in order to
decide whether this is interesting or not.
Some function and variable names are still subject to change for
a better overall logics.
The first implementation of the monotonic clock did not verify
forward jumps. The consequence is that a fast changing time may
expire a lot of tasks. While it does seem minor, in fact it is
problematic because most machines which boot with a wrong date
are in the past and suddenly see their time jump by several
years in the future.
The solution is to check if we spent more apparent time in
a poller than allowed (with a margin applied). The margin
is currently set to 1000 ms. It should be large enough for
any poll() to complete.
Tests with randomly jumping clock show that the result is quite
accurate (error less than 1 second at every change of more than
one second).
If the system date is set backwards while haproxy is running,
some scheduled events are delayed by the amount of time the
clock went backwards. This is particularly problematic on
systems where the date is set at boot, because it seldom
happens that health-checks do not get sent for a few hours.
Before switching to use clock_gettime() on systems which
provide it, we can at least ensure that the clock is not
going backwards and maintain two clocks : the "date" which
represents what the user wants to see (mostly for logs),
and an internal date stored in "now", used for scheduled
events.
Under some circumstances, a task may already lie in the run queue
(eg: inter-task wakeup). It is disastrous to wait for an event in
this case because some processing gets delayed.
GCC4 is stupid (unbelievable news!).
When some code uses __builtin_expect(x != 0, 1), it really performs
the check of x != 0 then tests that the result is not zero! This is
a double check when only one was expected. Some performance drops
of 10% in the HTTP parser code have been observed due to this bug.
GCC 3.4 is fine though.
A solution consists in expecting that the tested value is 1. In
this case, it emits the correct code, but it's still not optimal
it seems. Finally the best solution is to ignore likely() and to
pray for the compiler to emit correct code. However, we still have
to fix unlikely() to remove the test there too, and to fix all
code which passed pointers overthere to pass integers instead.
By default, epoll/kqueue used to return as many events as possible.
This could sometimes cause huge latencies (latencies of up to 400 ms
have been observed with many thousands of fds at once). Limiting the
number of events returned also reduces the latency by avoiding too
many blind processing. The value is set to 200 by default and can be
changed in the global section using the tune.maxpollevents parameter.
Recreate the epoll file descriptor after a fork(). It will ensure
that all processes will not share their epoll_fd. Some side effects
were encountered because of this, such as epoll_wait() returning an
FD which was previously deleted, in multi-process mode.
Introduction of timeval timers broke *poll-based pollers, because the call to
tv_ms_remain may return 0 while the event is not elapsed yet. Now we carefully
check for those cases and round the result up by 1 ms.
The timeout functions were difficult to manipulate because they were
rounding results to the millisecond. Thus, it was difficult to compare
and to check what expired and what did not. Also, the comparison
functions were heavy with multiplies and divides by 1000. Now, all
timeouts are stored in timevals, reducing the number of operations
for updates and leading to cleaner and more efficient code.
Gcc provides __attribute__((constructor)) which is very convenient
to execute functions at startup right before main(). All the pollers
have been converted to have their register() function declared like
this, so that it is not necessary anymore to call them from a centralized
file.
Some pollers such as kqueue lose their FD across fork(), meaning that
the registered file descriptors are lost too. Now when the proxies are
started by start_proxies(), the file descriptors are not registered yet,
leaving enough time for the fork() to take place and to get a new pollfd.
It will be the first call to maintain_proxies that will register them.
select, poll and epoll now have their dedicated functions and have
been split into distinct files. Several FD manipulation primitives
have been provided with each poller.
The rest of the code needs to be cleaned to remove traces of
StaticReadEvent/StaticWriteEvent. A trick involving a macro has
temporarily been used right now. Some work needs to be done to
factorize tests and sets everywhere.