We have been abusing the do_poll()'s timeout for a while, making it zero
whenever there is some known activity. The problem this poses is that it
complicates activity diagnostic by incrementing the poll_exp field for
each known activity. It also requires extra computations that could be
avoided.
This change passes a "wake" argument to say that the poller must not
sleep. This simplifies the operations and allows one to differenciate
expirations from activity.
At the moment the situation with activity measurement is quite tricky
because the struct activity is defined in global.h and declared in
haproxy.c, with operations made in time.h and relying on freq_ctr
which are defined in freq_ctr.h which itself includes time.h. It's
barely possible to touch any of these files without breaking all the
circular dependency.
Let's move all this stuff to activity.{c,h} and be done with it. The
measurement of active and stolen time is now done in a dedicated
function called just after tv_before_poll() instead of mixing the two,
which used to be a lazy (but convenient) decision.
No code was changed, stuff was just moved around.
By placing this code into time.h (tv_entering_poll() and tv_leaving_poll())
we can remove the logic from the pollers and prepare for extending this to
offer more accurate time measurements.
The 4 pollers all contain the same code used to compute the poll timeout.
This is pointless, let's centralize this into fd.h. This also gets rid of
the useless SCHEDULER_RESOLUTION macro which used to work arond a very old
linux 2.2 bug causing select() to wake up slightly before the timeout.
The current synchronization point enforces certain restrictions which
are hard to workaround in certain areas of the code. The fact that the
critical code can only be called from the sync point itself is a problem
for some callback-driven parts. The "show fd" command for example is
fragile regarding this.
Also it is expensive in terms of CPU usage because it wakes every other
thread just to be sure all of them join to the rendez-vous point. It's a
problem because the sleeping threads would not need to be woken up just
to know they're doing nothing.
Here we implement a different approach. We keep track of harmless threads,
which are defined as those either doing nothing, or doing harmless things.
The rendez-vous is used "for others" as a way for a thread to isolate itself.
A thread then requests to be alone using thread_isolate() when approaching
the dangerous area, and then waits until all other threads are either doing
the same or are doing something harmless (typically polling). The function
only returns once the thread is guaranteed to be alone, and the critical
section is terminated using thread_release().
The polled_mask is only used in the pollers, and removing it from the
struct fdtab makes it fit in one 64B cacheline again, on a 64bits machine,
so make it a separate array.
With the old model, any fd shared by multiple threads, such as listeners
or dns sockets, would only be updated on one threads, so that could lead
to missed event, or spurious wakeups.
To avoid this, add a global list for fd that are shared, using the same
implementation as the fd cache, and only remove entries from this list
when every thread as updated its poller.
[wt: this will need to be backported to 1.8 but differently so this patch
must not be backported as-is]
Clearing the update_mask bit in fd_insert may lead to duplicate insertion
of fd in fd_updt, that could lead to a write past the end of the array.
Instead, make sure the update_mask bit is cleared by the pollers no matter
what.
This should be backported to 1.8.
[wt: warning: 1.8 doesn't have the lockless fdcache changes and will
require some careful changes in the pollers]
The polling updates are now performed exactly like the epoll/kqueue
ones : only the new polled state is considered, and the previous one
is checked using polled_mask. The only specific stuff here is that
the fd state is shared between all threads, so an FD removal has to
be done only once.
Given that FD_{CLR,SET} are not always guaranteed to be thread safe,
let's fall back to using the hap_fd_* functions as we used to till
1.5-dev18 and as poll() continues to use. This will make it easier
to remove the poll_lock.
Since only select() and poll() still make use of maxfd, let's move
its computation right there in the pollers themselves, and only
during each fd update pass. The computation doesn't need a lock
anymore, only a few atomic ops. It will be accurate, be done much
less often and will not be required anymore in the FD's fast patch.
This provides a small performance increase of about 1% in connection
rate when using epoll since we get rid of this computation which was
performed under a lock.
Since the fd update tables are per-thread, we need to have a bit per
thread to indicate whether an update exists, otherwise this can lead
to lost update events every time multiple threads want to update the
same FD. In practice *for now*, it only happens at start time when
listeners are enabled and ask for polling after facing their first
EAGAIN. But since the pollers are still shared, a lost event is still
recovered by a neighbor thread. This will not reliably work anymore
with per-thread pollers, where it has been observed a few times on
startup that a single-threaded listener would not always accept
incoming connections upon startup.
It's worth noting that during this code review it appeared that the
"new" flag in the fdtab isn't used anymore.
This fix should be backported to 1.8.
A number of counters have been added at special places helping better
understanding certain bug reports. These counters are maintained per
thread and are shown using "show activity" on the CLI. The "clear
counters" commands also reset these counters. The output is sent as a
single write(), which currently produces up to about 7 kB of data for
64 threads. If more counters are added, it may be necessary to write
into multiple buffers, or to reset the counters.
To backport to 1.8 to help collect more detailed bug reports.
It was a leftover from the last cleaning session; this mask applies
to threads and calling it process_mask is a bit confusing. It's the
same in fd, task and applets.
There was a flaw in the way the threads was created. the main one was just used
to create all the others and just wait to exit. Now, it is used to run a poll
loop. So we only create nbthread-1 threads.
This also fixes a bug about the compression filter when there is only 1 thread
(nbthread == 1 or no threads support). The bug was in the way thread-local
resources was initialized. per-thread init/deinit callbacks were never called
for the main process. So, with nthread set to 1, some buffers remained
uninitialized.
Many changes have been made to do so. First, the fd_updt array, where all
pending FDs for polling are stored, is now a thread-local array. Then 3 locks
have been added to protect, respectively, the fdtab array, the fd_cache array
and poll information. In addition, a lock for each entry in the fdtab array has
been added to protect all accesses to a specific FD or its information.
For pollers, according to the poller, the way to manage the concurrency is
different. There is a poller loop on each thread. So the set of monitored FDs
may need to be protected. epoll and kqueue are thread-safe per-se, so there few
things to do to protect these pollers. This is not possible with select and
poll, so there is no sharing between the threads. The poller on each thread is
independant from others.
Finally, per-thread init/deinit functions are used for each pollers and for FD
part for manage thread-local ressources.
Now, you must be carefull when a FD is created during the HAProxy startup. All
update on the FD state must be made in the threads context and never before
their creation. This is mandatory because fd_updt array is thread-local and
initialized only for threads. Because there is no pollers for the main one, this
array remains uninitialized in this context. For this reason, listeners are now
enabled in run_thread_poll_loop function, just like the worker pipe.
We'll need to differenciate between pollers which can report hangup at
the same time as read (POLL_RDHUP) from the other ones, because only
these ones may benefit from the fd_done_recv() optimization. Epoll has
had support for EPOLLRDHUP since Linux 2.6.17 and has always been used
this way in haproxy, so now we only set the flag once we've observed it
once in a response. It means that some initial requests may try to
perform a second recv() call, but after the first closed connection it
will be enough to know that the second call is not needed anymore.
Later we may extend these flags to designate event-triggered pollers.
The poll() functions have become a bit dirty because they now check the
size of the signal queue, the FD cache and the number of tasks. It's not
their job, this must be moved to the caller. In the end it simplifies the
code because the expiration date is now set to now_ms if we must not wait,
and this achieves in exactly the same result and is cleaner. The change
looks large due to the change of indent for blocks which were inside an
"if" block.
In order for HTTP/2 not to eat too much memory, we'll have to support
on-the-fly buffer allocation, since most streams will have an empty
request buffer at some point. Supporting allocation on the fly means
being able to sleep inside I/O callbacks if a buffer is not available.
Till now, the I/O callbacks were called from two locations :
- when processing the cached events
- when processing the polled events from the poller
This change cleans up the design a bit further than what was started in
1.5. It now ensures that we never call any iocb from the poller itself
and that instead, events learned by the poller are put into the cache.
The benefit is important in terms of stability : we don't have to care
anymore about the risk that new events are added into the poller while
processing its events, and we're certain that updates are processed at
a single location.
To achieve this, we now modify all the fd_* functions so that instead of
creating updates, they add/remove the fd to/from the cache depending on
its state, and only create an update when the polling status reaches a
state where it will have to change. Since the pollers make use of these
functions to notify readiness (using fd_may_recv/fd_may_send), the cache
is always up to date with the poller.
Creating updates only when the polling status needs to change saves a
significant amount of work for the pollers : a benchmark showed that on
a typical TCP proxy test, the amount of updates per connection dropped
from 11 to 1 on average. This also means that the update list is smaller
and has more chances of not thrashing too many CPU cache lines. The first
observed benefit is a net 2% performance gain on the connection rate.
A second benefit is that when a connection is accepted, it's only when
we're processing the cache, and the recv event is automatically added
into the cache *after* the current one, resulting in this event to be
processed immediately during the same loop. Previously we used to have
a second run over the updates to detect if new events were added to
catch them before waking up tasks.
The next gain will be offered by the next steps on this subject consisting
in implementing an I/O queue containing all cached events ordered by priority
just like the run queue, and to be able to leave some events pending there
as long as needed. That will allow us *not* to perform some FD processing
if it's not the proper time for this (typically keep waiting for a buffer
to be allocated if none is available for an recv()). And by only processing
a small bunch of them, we'll allow priorities to take place even at the I/O
level.
As a result of this change, functions fd_alloc_or_release_cache_entry()
and fd_process_polled_events() have disappeared, and the code dedicated
to checking for new fd events after the callback during the poll() loop
was removed as well. Despite the patch looking large, it's mostly a
change of what function is falled upon fd_*() and almost nothing was
added.
This function is used to compute the new polling state based on
the previous state. All pollers have to do this in their update
loop, so better centralize the logic for it.
Currently, each poll loop handles the polled events the same way,
resulting in a lot of duplicated, complex code. Additionally, epoll
was the only one to handle newly created FDs immediately.
So instead, let's move that code to fd.c in a new function dedicated
to this task : fd_process_polled_events(). All pollers now use this
function.
This commit heavily changes the polling system in order to definitely
fix the frequent breakage of SSL which needs to remember the last
EAGAIN before deciding whether to poll or not. Now we have a state per
direction for each FD, as opposed to a previous and current state
previously. An FD can have up to 8 different states for each direction,
each of which being the result of a 3-bit combination. These 3 bits
indicate a wish to access the FD, the readiness of the FD and the
subscription of the FD to the polling system.
This means that it will now be possible to remember the state of a
file descriptor across disable/enable sequences that generally happen
during forwarding, where enabling reading on a previously disabled FD
would result in forgetting the EAGAIN flag it met last time.
Several new state manipulation functions have been introduced or
adapted :
- fd_want_{recv,send} : enable receiving/sending on the FD regardless
of its state (sets the ACTIVE flag) ;
- fd_stop_{recv,send} : stop receiving/sending on the FD regardless
of its state (clears the ACTIVE flag) ;
- fd_cant_{recv,send} : report a failure to receive/send on the FD
corresponding to EAGAIN (clears the READY flag) ;
- fd_may_{recv,send} : report the ability to receive/send on the FD
as reported by poll() (sets the READY flag) ;
Some functions are used to report the current FD status :
- fd_{recv,send}_active
- fd_{recv,send}_ready
- fd_{recv,send}_polled
Some functions were removed :
- fd_ev_clr(), fd_ev_set(), fd_ev_rem(), fd_ev_wai()
The POLLHUP/POLLERR flags are now reported as ready so that the I/O layers
knows it can try to access the file descriptor to get this information.
In order to simplify the conditions to add/remove cache entries, a new
function fd_alloc_or_release_cache_entry() was created to be used from
pollers while scanning for updates.
The following pollers have been updated :
ev_select() : done, built, tested on Linux 3.10
ev_poll() : done, built, tested on Linux 3.10
ev_epoll() : done, built, tested on Linux 3.10 & 3.13
ev_kqueue() : done, built, tested on OpenBSD 5.2
We're completely changing the way FDs will be polled. There will be no
more speculative I/O since we'll know the exact FD state, so these will
only be cached events.
First, let's fix a few field names which become confusing. "spec_e" was
used to store a speculative I/O event state. Now we'll store the whole
R/W states for the FD there. "spec_p" was used to store a speculative
I/O cache position. Now let's clearly call it "cache".
We're completely changing the way FDs will be polled. First, let's fix
a few field names which become confusing. "spec_e" was used to store a
speculative I/O event state. Now we'll store the whole R/W states for
the FD there.
Some recent glibc updates have added controls on FD_SET/FD_CLR/FD_ISSET
that crash the program if it tries to use a file descriptor larger than
FD_SETSIZE.
For this reason, we now control the compatibility between global.maxsock
and FD_SETSIZE, and refuse to use select() if there too many FDs are
expected to be used. Note that on Solaris, FD_SETSIZE is already forced
to 65536, and that FreeBSD and OpenBSD allow it to be redefined, though
this is not needed thanks to kqueue which is much more efficient.
In practice, since poll() is enabled on all targets, it should not cause
any problem, unless it is explicitly disabled.
This change must be backported to 1.4 because the crashes caused by glibc
have already been reported on this version.
When a polled I/O event is detected, the event is added to the updates
list and the I/O handler is called. Upon return, if the event handler
did not experience an EAGAIN, the event remains in the updates list so
that it will be processed later. But if the event was already in the
spec list, its state is updated and it will be called again immediately
upon exit, by fd_process_spec_events(), so this creates unfairness
between speculative events and polled events.
So don't call the I/O handler upon I/O detection when the FD already is
in the spec list. The fd events are still updated so that the spec list
is up to date with the possible I/O change.
Errors and Hangups are sticky events, which means that once they're
detected, we never clear them, allowing them to be handled later if
needed.
Till now when an error was reported, it used to register a speculative
I/O event for both recv and send. Since the connection had not requested
such events, it was not able to detect a change and did not clear them,
so the events were called in loops until a timeout caused their owner
task to die.
So this patch does two things :
- stop registering spec events when no I/O activity was requested,
so that we don't end up with non-disablable polling state ;
- keep the sticky polling flags (ERR and HUP) when leaving the
connection handler so that an error notification doesn't
magically become a normal recv() or send() report once the
event is converted to a spec event.
It is normally not needed to make the connection handler emit an
error when it detects POLL_ERR because either a registered data
handler will have done it, or the event will be disabled by the
wake() callback.
The old EV_FD_SET() macro was confusing, as it would enable receipt but there
was no way to indicate that EAGAIN was received, hence the recently added
FD_WAIT_* flags. They're not enough as we're still facing a conflict between
EV_FD_* and FD_WAIT_*. So let's offer I/O functions what they need to explicitly
request polling.
These primitives were initially introduced so that callers were able to
conditionally set/disable polling on a file descriptor and check in return
what the state was. It's been long since we last had an "if" on this, and
all pollers' functions were the same for cond_* and their systematic
counter parts, except that this required a check and a specific return
value that are not always necessary.
So let's simplify the FD API by removing this now unused distinction and
by making all specific functions return void.
In an attempt to get rid of fdtab[].state, and to move the relevant
parts to the connection struct, we remove the FD_STCLOSE state which
can easily be deduced from the <owner> pointer as there is a 1:1 match.
fdtab[].ev was only set in ev_sepoll. Unfortunately, some I/O handling
functions now rely on this, so depending on the polling mechanism, some
useless operations might have been performed, such as performing a useless
recv() when a HUP was reported.
This is a very old issue, the flags were only added to the fdtab and not
propagated into any poller. Then they were used in ev_sepoll which needed
them for the cache. It is unsure whether a backport to 1.4 is appropriate
or not.
We now measure the work and idle times in order to report the idle
time in the stats. It's expected that we'll be able to use it at
other places later.
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.
