Sometimes we need to be able to change the default kernel socket
buffer size (recv and send). Four new global settings have been
added for this :
- tune.rcvbuf.client
- tune.rcvbuf.server
- tune.sndbuf.client
- tune.sndbuf.server
Those can be used to reduce kernel memory footprint with large numbers
of concurrent connections, and to reduce risks of write timeouts with
very slow clients due to excessive kernel buffering.
This change, suggested by Cyril Bonté, makes a lot of sense and
would have made it obvious that sessid was not properly initialized
while switching to keep-alive. The code is now cleaner.
This code really belongs to the http part since it's transaction-specific.
This will also make it easier to later reinitialize a transaction in order
to support keepalive.
We used to apply a limit to each buffer's size in order to leave
some room to rewrite headers, then we used to remove this limit
once the session switched to a data state.
Proceeding that way becomes a problem with keepalive because we
have to know when to stop reading too much data into the buffer
so that we can leave some room again to process next requests.
The principle we adopt here consists in only relying on to_forward+send_max.
Indeed, both of those data define how many bytes will leave the buffer.
So as long as their sum is larger than maxrewrite, we can safely
fill the buffers. If they are smaller, then we refrain from filling
the buffer. This means that we won't risk to fill buffers when
reading last data chunk followed by a POST request and its contents.
The only impact identified so far is that we must ensure that the
BF_FULL flag is correctly dropped when starting to forward. Right
now this is OK because nobody inflates to_forward without using
buffer_forward().
This patch has 2 goals :
1. I wanted to test the appsession feature with a small PHP code,
using PHPSESSID. The problem is that when PHP gets an unknown session
id, it creates a new one with this ID. So, when sending an unknown
session to PHP, persistance is broken : haproxy won't see any new
cookie in the response and will never attach this session to a
specific server.
This also happens when you restart haproxy : the internal hash becomes
empty and all sessions loose their persistance (load balancing the
requests on all backend servers, creating a new session on each one).
For a user, it's like the service is unusable.
The patch modifies the code to make haproxy also learn the persistance
from the client : if no session is sent from the server, then the
session id found in the client part (using the URI or the client cookie)
is used to associated the server that gave the response.
As it's probably not a feature usable in all cases, I added an option
to enable it (by default it's disabled). The syntax of appsession becomes :
appsession <cookie> len <length> timeout <holdtime> [request-learn]
This helps haproxy repair the persistance (with the risk of losing its
session at the next request, as the user will probably not be load
balanced to the same server the first time).
2. This patch also tries to reduce the memory usage.
Here is a little example to explain the current behaviour :
- Take a Tomcat server where /session.jsp is valid.
- Send a request using a cookie with an unknown value AND a path
parameter with another unknown value :
curl -b "JSESSIONID=12345678901234567890123456789012" http://<haproxy>/session.jsp;jsessionid=00000000000000000000000000000001
(I know, it's unexpected to have a request like that on a live service)
Here, haproxy finds the URI session ID and stores it in its internal
hash (with no server associated). But it also finds the cookie session
ID and stores it again.
- As a result, session.jsp sends a new session ID also stored in the
internal hash, with a server associated.
=> For 1 request, haproxy has stored 3 entries, with only 1 which will be usable
The patch modifies the behaviour to store only 1 entry (maximum).
Some rarely information are stored in fdtab, making it larger for no
reason (source port ranges, remote address, ...). Such information
lie there because the checks can't find them anywhere else. The goal
will be to move these information to the stream interface once the
checks make use of it.
For now, we move them to an fdinfo array. This simple change might
have improved the cache hit ratio a little bit because a 0.5% of
performance increase has measured.
These ACLs are used to check the number of active connections on the
frontend, backend or in a backend's queue. The avg_queue returns the
average number of queued connections per server, and for this, divides
the total number of queued connections by the number of alive servers.
The dst_conn ACL has been slightly changed to more reflect its name and
original usage, which is to return the number of connections on the
destination address/port (the socket) and not the whole frontend.
This patch allows to collect & provide separate statistics for each socket.
It can be very useful if you would like to distinguish between traffic
generate by local and remote users or between different types of remote
clients (peerings, domestic, foreign).
Currently no "Session rate" is supported, but adding it should be possible
if we found it useful.
By default, when data is sent over a socket, both the write timeout and the
read timeout for that socket are refreshed, because we consider that there is
activity on that socket, and we have no other means of guessing if we should
receive data or not.
While this default behaviour is desirable for almost all applications, there
exists a situation where it is desirable to disable it, and only refresh the
read timeout if there are incoming data. This happens on sessions with large
timeouts and low amounts of exchanged data such as telnet session. If the
server suddenly disappears, the output data accumulates in the system's
socket buffers, both timeouts are correctly refreshed, and there is no way
to know the server does not receive them, so we don't timeout. However, when
the underlying protocol always echoes sent data, it would be enough by itself
to detect the issue using the read timeout. Note that this problem does not
happen with more verbose protocols because data won't accumulate long in the
socket buffers.
When this option is set on the frontend, it will disable read timeout updates
on data sent to the client. There probably is little use of this case. When
the option is set on the backend, it will disable read timeout updates on
data sent to the server. Doing so will typically break large HTTP posts from
slow lines, so use it with caution.
When stream interfaces will embedded applets running as part as their
holding task, we'll need a new callback to process them from the
session processor.
The BF_WRITE_ENA buffer flag became very complex to deal with, because
it was used to :
- enable automatic connection
- enable close forwarding
- enable data forwarding
The last point was not very true anymore since we introduced ->send_max,
but still the test remained everywhere. This was causing issues such as
impossibility to connect without forwarding data, impossibility to prevent
closing when data was forwarded, etc...
This patch clarifies the situation by getting rid of this multi-purpose
flag and replacing it with :
- data forwarding based only on ->send_max || ->pipe ;
- a new BF_AUTO_CONNECT flag to allow automatic connection and only
that ;
- ability to perform an automatic connection when ->send_max or ->pipe
indicate that data is waiting to leave the buffer ;
- a new BF_AUTO_CLOSE flag to let the producer automatically set the
BF_SHUTW_NOW flag when it gets a BF_SHUTR.
During this cleanup, it was discovered that some tests were performed
twice, or that the BF_HIJACK flag was still tested, which is not needed
anymore since ->send_max replcaed it. These places have been fixed too.
These cleanups have also revealed a few areas where the other flags
such as BF_EMPTY are not cleanly used. This will be an opportunity for
a second patch.
We used to call stream_sock_data_finish() directly at the end of
a session update, but if we want to support non-socket interfaces,
we need to have this function configurable. Now we access it via
->update().
The new tune.bufsize and tune.maxrewrite global directives allow one to
change the buffer size and the maxrewrite size. Right now, setting bufsize
too low will block stats sockets which will not be able to write at all.
An error checking must be added to buffer_write_chunk() so that if it
cannot write its message to an empty buffer, it causes the caller to abort.
The first step towards dynamic buffer size consists in removing
all static definitions of the buffer size. Instead, we store a
buffer's size in itself. Right now they're all preinitialized
to BUFSIZE, but we will change that.
s->srv_error was set depending on the frontend's protocol. Now it is
set by the HTTP analyser, so that even when switching from a TCP
frontend to an HTTP backend, we can have HTTP error messages.
Analyser bitmaps are now stored in the frontend and backend, and
combined at configuration time. That way, set_session_backend()
does not need to perform any protocol-specific combinations.
Since the listener is the one indicating what analyser and session
handlers to call, it makes sense that it also sets the task's nice
value. This also helps getting rid of the last trace of the stats
in the proto_uxst file.
In order to merge the unix session handling code, we have to maintain
the number of per-listener connections in the session. This was only
performed for unix sockets till now.
The connection establishment was completely handled by backend.c which
normally just handles LB algos. Since it's purely TCP, it must move to
proto_tcp.c. Also, instead of calling it directly, we now call it via
the stream interface, which will later help us unify session handling.
Now that we can perform TCP-based content switching, it makes sense
to be able to detect HTTP traffic and act accordingly. We already
have an HTTP decoder, we just have to call it in order to detect HTTP
protocol. Note that since the decoder will automatically fill in the
interesting fields of the HTTP transaction, it would make sense to
use this parsing to extend HTTP matching to TCP.
Right now only HTTP proxies may use HTTP headers in ACLs, but
when this evolves, we'll need to be able to allocate the hdr_idx
on demand. The solution consists in allocating it only when it is
certain that at least one ACL requires HTTP parsing, regardless
of the mode the proxy is in. This is what is achieved by this
patch.
The HTTP processing has been splitted into 7 steps, one of which
is not anymore HTTP-specific (content-switching). That way, it
becomes possible to use "use_backend" rules in TCP mode. A new
"use_server" directive should follow soon.
The splice code did not consider compatibility between both ends
of the connection. Now we set different capabilities on each
stream interface, depending on what the protocol can splice to/from.
Right now, only TCP is supported. Thanks to this, we're now able to
automatically detect when splice() is not implemented and automatically
disable it on one end instead of reporting errors to the upper layer.
When the nolinger option is used, we must not close too fast because
some data might be left unsent. Instead we must proceed with a normal
shutdown first, then a close. Also, we want to avoid merging FIN with
the last segment if nolinger is set, because if that one gets lost,
there is no chance for it to be retransmitted.
Setting TCP_CORK on a socket before sending the last segment enables
automatic merging of this segment with the FIN from the shutdown()
call. Playing with TCP_CORK is not easy though as we have to track
the status of the TCP_NODELAY flag since both are mutually exclusive.
Doing so saves one more packet per session and offers about 5% more
performance.
There is no reason not to do it, so there is no associated option.
Some users want to keep the max sessions/s seen on servers, frontends
and backends for capacity planning. It's easy to grab it while the
session count is updated, so let's keep it.
The response message in the transaction structure was not properly
initialised at session initialisation. In theory it cannot cause any
trouble since the affected field os expected to always remain NULL.
However, in some circumstances, such as building on 64-bit platforms
with certain options, the struct session can be exactly 1024 bytes,
the same size of the requri field, so the pools are merged and the
uninitialised field may contain non-null data, causing crashes if
an invalid response is encountered and archived.
The fix simply consists in correctly initialising the missing fields.
This bug cannot affect architectures where the session pool is not
shared (32-bit architectures), but this is only by pure luck.
Sometimes it is required to let invalid requests pass because
applications sometimes take time to be fixed and other servers
do not care. Thus we provide two new options :
option accept-invalid-http-request (for the frontend)
option accept-invalid-http-response (for the backend)
When those options are set, invalid requests or responses do
not cause a 403/502 error to be generated.
If the accept() is done before checking for global.maxconn, we can
accept too many connections and encounter a lack of file descriptors
when trying to connect to the server. This is the cause of the
"cannot get a server socket" message encountered in debug mode
during injections with low timeouts.
When the reader does not expect to read lots of data, it can
set BF_READ_DONTWAIT on the request buffer. When it is set,
the stream_sock_read callback will not try to perform multiple
reads, it will return after only one, and clear the flag.
That way, we can immediately return when waiting for an HTTP
request without trying to read again.
On pure request/responses schemes such as monitor-uri or
redirects, this has completely eliminated the EAGAIN occurrences
and the epoll_ctl() calls, resulting in a performance increase of
about 10%. Similar effects should be observed once we support
HTTP keep-alive since we'll immediately disable reads once we
get a full request.
It's sometimes useful at least for statistics to keep a task count.
It's easy to do by forcing the rare task creators to always use the
same functions to create/destroy a task.
In order to get termination flags properly updated, the session was
relying a bit too much on http_return_srv_error() which is http-centric.
A generic srv_error function was implemented in the session in order to
catch all connection abort situations. It was then noticed that a request
abort during a connection attempt was not reported, which is now fixed.
Read and write errors/timeouts were not logged either. It was necessary
to add those tests at 4 new locations.
Now it looks like everything is correctly logged. Most likely some error
checking code could now be removed from some analysers.
term_trace was very useful while reworking the lower layers but has almost
completely been removed from every place it was referenced. Even the few
remaining ones were not accurate, so it's better to completely remove those
references and re-add them from scratch later if needed.
The rate-limit was applied to the smoothed value which does a special
case for frequencies below 2 events per period. This caused irregular
limitations when set to 1 session per second.
The proper way to handle this is to compute the number of remaining
events that can occur without reaching the limit. This is what has
been added. It also has the benefit that the frequency calculation
is now done once when entering event_accept(), before the accept()
loop, and not once per accept() loop anymore, thus saving a few CPU
cycles during very high loads.
With this fix, rate limits of 1/s are perfectly respected.
The new "rate-limit sessions" statement sets a limit on the number of
new connections per second on the frontend. As it is extremely accurate
(about 0.1%), it is efficient at limiting resource abuse or DoS.
With this change, all frontends, backends, and servers maintain a session
counter and a timer to compute a session rate over the last second. This
value will be very useful because it varies instantly and can be used to
check thresholds. This value is also reported in the stats in a new "rate"
column.
Commit 8a5c626e73 introduced the sessions
dump on the unix socket. This implementation is buggy because it may try
to link to the sessions list's head after the last session is removed
with a backref. Also, for the LIST_ISEMPTY test to succeed, we have to
proceed with LIST_INIT after LIST_DEL.
In the buffers, the read limit used to leave some place for header
rewriting was set by a pointer to the end of the buffer. Not only
this required subtracts at every place in the code, but this will
also soon not be usable anymore when we want to support keepalive.
Let's replace this with a length limit, comparable to the buffer's
length. This has also sightly reduced the code size.
By letting the producer tell the consumer there is data to check,
and the consumer tell the producer there is some space left again,
we can cut in half the number of session wakeups.
This is also an important starting point for future splicing support.
This is the first step in implementing a session dump tool.
A session dump will need restart points. It will be necessary for
it to get references to sessions which can be moved when the session
dies.
The principle is not that complex : when a session ends, it looks for
any potential back-references. If it finds any, then it moves them to
the next session in the list. The dump function will of course have
to restart from that new point.
The listener referenced in the fd was only used to check the
listener state upon session termination. There was no guarantee
that the FD had not been reassigned by the moment it was processed,
so this was a bit racy. Having it in the session is more robust.
