The global table of known variables names can only grow and was designed
for static names that are registered at boot. Nowadays it's possible to
set dynamic variable names from Lua or from the CLI, which causes a real
problem that was partially addressed in 2.2 with commit 4e172c93f
("MEDIUM: lua: Add `ifexist` parameter to `set_var`"). Please see github
issue #624 for more context.
This patch simplifies all this by removing the need for a central
registry of known names, and storing 64-bit hashes instead. This is
highly sufficient given the low number of variables in each context.
The hash is calculated using XXH64() which is bijective over the 64-bit
space thus is guaranteed collision-free for 1..8 chars. Above that the
risk remains around 1/2^64 per extra 8 chars so in practice this is
highly sufficient for our usage. A random seed is used at boot to seed
the hash so that it's not attackable from Lua for example.
There's one particular nit though. The "ifexist" hack mentioned above
is now limited to variables of scope "proc" only, and will only match
variables that were already created or declared, but will now verify
the scope as well. This may affect some bogus Lua scripts and SPOE
agents which used to accidentally work because a similarly named
variable used to exist in a different scope. These ones may need to be
fixed to comply with the doc.
Now we can sum up the situation as this one:
- ephemeral variables (scopes sess, txn, req, res) will always be
usable, regardless of any prior declaration. This effectively
addresses the most problematic change from the commit above that
in order to work well could have required some script auditing ;
- process-wide variables (scope proc) that are mentioned in the
configuration, referenced in a "register-var-names" SPOE directive,
or created via "set-var" in the global section or the CLI, are
permanent and will always accept to be set, with or without the
"ifexist" restriction (SPOE uses this internally as well).
- process-wide variables (scope proc) that are only created via a
set-var() tcp/http action, via Lua's set_var() calls, or via an
SPOE with the "force-set-var" directive), will not be permanent
but will always accept to be replaced once they are created, even
if "ifexist" is present
- process-wide variables (scope proc) that do not exist will only
support being created via the set-var() tcp/http action, Lua's
set_var() calls without "ifexist", or an SPOE declared with
"force-set-var".
This means that non-proc variables do not care about "ifexist" nor
prior declaration, and that using "ifexist" should most often be
reliable in Lua and that SPOE should most often work without any
prior declaration. It may be doable to turn "ifexist" to 1 by default
in Lua to further ease the transition. Note: regtests were adjusted.
Cc: Tim Düsterhus <tim@bastelstu.be>
Some regtests involve multiple requests from multiple clients, which can
be dispatched as multiple requests to a server. It turns out that the
idle connection sharing works so well that very quickly few connections
are used, and regularly some of the remaining idle server connections
time out at the moment they were going to be reused, causing those random
"HTTP header incomplete" traces in the logs that make them fail often. In
the end this is only an artefact of the test environment.
And indeed, some tests like normalize-uri which perform a lot of reuse
fail very often, about 20-30% of the times in the CI, and 100% of the
time in local when running 1000 tests in a row. Others like ubase64,
sample_fetches or vary_* fail less often but still a lot in tests.
This patch addresses this by adding "tune.idle-pool.shared off" to all
tests which have at least twice as many requests as clients. It proves
very effective as no single error happens on normalize-uri anymore after
10000 tests. Also 100 full runs of all tests yield no error anymore.
One test is tricky, http_abortonclose, it used to fail ~10 times per
1000 runs and with this workaround still fails once every 1000 runs.
But the test is complex and there's a warning in it mentioning a
possible issue when run in parallel due to a port reuse.
As discussed in GitHub issue #624 Lua scripts should not use
variables that are never going to be read, because the memory
for variable names is never going to be freed.
Add an optional `ifexist` parameter to the `set_var` function
that allows a Lua developer to set variables that are going to
be ignored if the variable name was not used elsewhere before.
Usually this mean that there is no `var()` sample fetch for the
variable in question within the configuration.
Willy Tarreau
Tim Duesterhus
Christopher Faulet