It removes dependencies with futex or mutex but ssl performances decrease
using nbproc > 1 because switching process force session renegotiation.
This can be useful on small systems which never intend to run in multi-process
mode.
We don't needa to lock the memory when there is a single process. This can
make a difference on small systems where locking is much more expensive than
just a test.
This SSL session cache was developped at Exceliance and is the same that
was proposed for stunnel and stud. It makes use of a shared memory area
between the processes so that sessions can be handled by any process. It
is only useful when haproxy runs with nbproc > 1, but it does not hurt
performance at all with nbproc = 1. The aim is to totally replace OpenSSL's
internal cache.
The cache is optimized for Linux >= 2.6 and specifically for x86 platforms.
On Linux/x86, it makes use of futexes for inter-process locking, with some
x86 assembly for the locked instructions. On other architectures, GCC
builtins are used instead, which are available starting from gcc 4.1.
On other operating systems, the locks fall back to pthread mutexes so
libpthread is automatically linked. It is not recommended since pthreads
are much slower than futexes. The lib is only linked if SSL is enabled.