Actually, HAProxy uses the function "process_runnable_tasks" and
"wake_expired_tasks" to get the next task which can expires.
If a task is added with "task_schedule" or other method during
the execution of an other task, the expiration of this new task
is not taken into account, and the execution of this task can be
too late.
Actualy, HAProxy seems to be no sensitive to this bug.
This fix moves the call to process_runnable_tasks() before the timeout
calculation and ensures that all wakeups are processed together. Only
wake_expired_tasks() needs to return a timeout now.
As found by Thierry Fournier, if a task manages to kill another one and
if this other task is the next one in the run queue, we can do whatever
including crashing, because the scheduler restarts from the saved next
task. For now, there is no such concept of a task killing another one,
but with Lua it will come.
A solution consists in always performing the lookup of the first task in
the scheduler's loop, but it's expensive and costs around 2% of the
performance.
Another solution consists in keeping a global next run queue node and
ensuring that when this task gets removed, it updates this pointer to
the next one. This allows to simplify the code a bit and in the end to
slightly increase the performance (0.3-0.5%). The mechanism might still
be usable if we later migrate to a multi-threaded scheduler.
When we're stopping, we're not going to create new tasks anymore, so
let's release the task pool upon each task_free() in order to reduce
memory fragmentation.
This function is finally not needed anymore, as it has been replaced with
a per-proxy task that is scheduled when some limits are encountered on
incoming connections or when the process is stopping. The savings should
be noticeable on configs with a large number of proxies. The most important
point is that the rate limiting is now enforced in a clean and solid way.
The two new functions below make it possible to register any number
of functions or tasks to a system signal. They will be called in the
registration order when the signal is received.
struct sig_handler *signal_register_fct(int sig, void (*fct)(struct sig_handler *), int arg);
struct sig_handler *signal_register_task(int sig, struct task *task, int reason);
All files referencing the previous ebtree code were changed to point
to the new one in the ebtree directory. A makefile variable (EBTREE_DIR)
is also available to use files from another directory.
The ability to build the libebtree library temporarily remains disabled
because it can have an impact on some existing toolchains and does not
appear worth it in the medium term if we add support for multi-criteria
stickiness for instance.
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.
The top of a duplicate tree is not where bit == -1 but at the most
negative bit. This was causing tasks to be queued in reverse order
within duplicates. While this is not dramatic, it's incorrect and
might lead to longer than expected duplicate depths under some
circumstances.
Since we're now able to search from a precise expiration date in
the timer tree using ebtree 4.1, we don't need to maintain 4 trees
anymore. Not only does this simplify the code a lot, but it also
ensures that we can always look 24 days back and ahead, which
doubles the ability of the previous scheduler. Indeed, while based
on absolute values, the timer tree is now relative to <now> as we
can always search from <now>-31 bits.
The run queue uses the exact same principle now, and is now simpler
and a bit faster to process. With these changes alone, an overall
0.5% performance gain was observed.
Tests were performed on the few wrapping cases and everything works
as expected.
Most of the time, task_queue() will immediately return. By extracting
the preliminary checks and putting them in an inline function, we can
significantly reduce the number of calls to the function itself, and
most of the tests can be optimized away due to the caller's context.
Another minor improvement in process_runnable_tasks() consisted in
taking benefit from the processor's branch prediction unit by making
a special case of the process_session() callback which is by far the
most common one.
All this improved performance by about 1%, mainly during the call
from process_runnable_tasks().
Timers are unsigned and used as tree positions. Ticks are signed and
used as absolute date within current time frame. While the two are
normally equal (except zero), it's important not to confuse them in
the code as they are not interchangeable.
We add two inline functions to turn each one into the other.
The comments have also been moved to the proper location, as it was
not easy to understand what was a tick and what was a timer unit.
In many situations, we wake a task on an I/O event, then queue it
exactly where it was. This is a real waste because we delete/insert
tasks into the wait queue for nothing. The only reason for this is
that there was only one tree node in the task struct.
By adding another tree node, we can have one tree for the timers
(wait queue) and one tree for the priority (run queue). That way,
we can have a task both in the run queue and wait queue at the
same time. The wait queue now really holds timers, which is what
it was designed for.
The net gain is at least 1 delete/insert cycle per session, and up
to 2-3 depending on the workload, since we save one cycle each time
the expiration date is not changed during a wake up.
It's very frequent to require some information about the
reason why a task is running. Some flags have been added
so that a task now knows if it got woken up due to I/O
completion, timeout, etc...
A test has shown that more than 16% of the calls to task_wakeup()
could be avoided because the task is already woken up. So make it
inline and move the test to the inline part.
This is the first attempt at moving all internal parts from
using struct timeval to integer ticks. Those provides simpler
and faster code due to simplified operations, and this change
also saved about 64 bytes per session.
A new header file has been added : include/common/ticks.h.
It is possible that some functions should finally not be inlined
because they're used quite a lot (eg: tick_first, tick_add_ifset
and tick_is_expired). More measurements are required in order to
decide whether this is interesting or not.
Some function and variable names are still subject to change for
a better overall logics.
When queuing a timer, it's very likely that an expiration date is
equal to that of the previously queued timer, due to time rounding
to the millisecond. Optimizing for this case provides a noticeable
1% performance boost.
The run queue scheduler now considers task->nice to queue a task and
to pick a task out of the queue. This makes it possible to boost the
access to statistics (both via HTTP and UNIX socket). The UNIX socket
receives twice as much a boost as the HTTP socket because it is more
sensible.
We now insert tasks in a certain sequence in the run queue.
The sorting key currently is the arrival order. It will now
be possible to apply a "nice" value to any task so that it
goes forwards or backwards in the run queue.
The calls to wake_expired_tasks() and maintain_proxies()
have been moved to the main run_poll_loop(), because they
had nothing to do in process_runnable_tasks().
The task_wakeup() function is not inlined anymore, as it was
only used at one place.
The qlist member of the task structure has been removed now.
The run_queue list has been replaced for an integer indicating
the number of tasks in the run queue.
The ultree code has been removed in favor of a simpler and
cleaner ebtree implementation. The eternity queue does not
need to exist anymore, and the pool_tree64 has been removed.
The ebtree node is stored in the task itself. The qlist list
header is still used by the run-queue, but will be able to
disappear once the run-queue uses ebtree too.
GCC4 is stupid (unbelievable news!).
When some code uses __builtin_expect(x != 0, 1), it really performs
the check of x != 0 then tests that the result is not zero! This is
a double check when only one was expected. Some performance drops
of 10% in the HTTP parser code have been observed due to this bug.
GCC 3.4 is fine though.
A solution consists in expecting that the tested value is 1. In
this case, it emits the correct code, but it's still not optimal
it seems. Finally the best solution is to ignore likely() and to
pray for the compiler to emit correct code. However, we still have
to fix unlikely() to remove the test there too, and to fix all
code which passed pointers overthere to pass integers instead.
The timeout functions were difficult to manipulate because they were
rounding results to the millisecond. Thus, it was difficult to compare
and to check what expired and what did not. Also, the comparison
functions were heavy with multiplies and divides by 1000. Now, all
timeouts are stored in timevals, reducing the number of operations
for updates and leading to cleaner and more efficient code.
The rbtree-based wait queue consumes a lot of CPU. Use the ul2tree
instead. Lots of cleanups and code reorganizations made it possible
to reduce the task struct and simplify the code a bit.
This patch from Sin Yu makes use of an rbtree for the wait queue,
which will solve the slowdown problem encountered when timeouts
are heterogenous in the configuration. The next step will be to
turn maintain_proxies() into a per-proxy task so that we won't
have to scan them all after each poll() loop.
The files are now stored under :
- include/haproxy for the generic includes
- include/types.h for the structures needed within prototypes
- include/proto.h for function prototypes and inline functions
- src/*.c for the C files
Most include files are now covered by LGPL. A last move still needs
to be done to put inline functions under GPL and not LGPL.
Version has been set to 1.3.0 in the code but some control still
needs to be done before releasing.
Thierry FOURNIER
Willy Tarreau
Willy Tarreau