diff --git a/doc/design-thoughts/connection-sharing.txt b/doc/design-thoughts/connection-sharing.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..99be1cdd60 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/design-thoughts/connection-sharing.txt @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +2014/10/28 - Server connection sharing + +For HTTP/2 we'll have to use multiplexed connections to the servers and to +share them between multiple streams. We'll also have to do this for H/1, but +with some variations since H1 doesn't offer connection status verification. + +In order to validate that an idle connection is still usable, it is desirable +to periodically send health checks over it. Normally, idle connections are +meant to be heavily used, so there is no reason for having them idle for a long +time. Thus we have two possibilities : + + - either we time them out after some inactivity, this saves server resources ; + - or we check them after some inactivity. For this we can send the server- + side HTTP health check (only when the server uses HTTP checks), and avoid + using that to mark the server down, and instead consider the connection as + dead. + +For HTTP/2 we'll have to send pings periodically over these connections, so +it's worth considering a per-connection task to validate that the channel still +works. + +In the current model, a connection necessarily belongs to a session, so it's +not really possible to share them, at best they can be exchanged, but that +doesn't make much sense as it means that it could disturb parallel traffic. + +Thus we need to have a per-server list of idle connections and a max-idle-conn +setting to kill them when there are too many. In the case of H/1 it is also +advisable to consider that if a connection was created to pass a first non- +idempotent request while other idle connections were still existing, then a +connection will have to be killed in order not to exceed the limit. +