This change gets rid of buf->r which is always equal to buf->p + buf->i.
It removed some wrapping detection at a number of places, but required addition
of new relative offset computations at other locations. A large number of places
can be simplified now with extreme care, since most of the time, either the
pointer has to be computed once or we need a difference between the old ->w and
old ->r to compute free space. The cleanup will probably happen with the rewrite
of the buffer_input_* and buffer_output_* functions anyway.
buf->lr still has to move to the struct http_msg and be relative to buf->p
for the rework to be complete.
This change introduces the buffer's base pointer, which is the limit between
incoming and outgoing data. It's the point where the parsing should start
from. A number of computations have already been greatly simplified, but
more simplifications are expected to come from the removal of buf->r.
The changes appear good and have revealed occasional improper use of some
pointers. It is possible that this patch has introduced bugs or revealed
some, although preliminary testings tend to indicate that everything still
works as it should.
We don't have buf->l anymore. We have buf->i for pending data and
the total length is retrieved by adding buf->o. Some computation
already become simpler.
Despite extreme care, bugs are not excluded.
It's worth noting that msg->err_pos as set by HTTP request/response
analysers becomes relative to pending data and not to the beginning
of the buffer. This has not been completed yet so differences might
occur when outgoing data are left in the buffer.
These callbacks are used to retrieve the source and destination address
of a socket. The address flags are not hold on the stream interface and
not on the session anymore. The addresses are collected when needed.
This still needs to be improved to store the IP and port separately so
that it is not needed to perform a getsockname() when only the IP address
is desired for outgoing traffic.
The Unique ID, is an ID generated with several informations. You can use
a log-format string to customize it, with the "unique-id-format" keyword,
and insert it in the request header, with the "unique-id-header" keyword.
%Fi: Frontend IP
%Fp: Frontend Port
%Si: Server IP
%Sp: Server Port
%Ts: Timestamp
%rt: HTTP request counter
%H: hostname
%pid: PID
+X: Hexadecimal represenation
The +X mode in logformat displays hexadecimal for the following flags
%Ci %Cp %Fi %Fp %Bi %Bp %Si %Sp %Ts %ct %pid
rename logformat_write_string() to lf_text()
Optimize size computation
* logformat functions now take a format linked list as argument
* build_logline() build a logline using a format linked list
* rename LOG_* by LOG_FMT_* in enum
* improve error management in build_logline()
memcmp()/strcmp() calls were needed in different parts of code to determine
the status code. Each new status code introduces new calls, which can become
inefficient and source of bugs.
This patch reorganizes the code to rely on a numeric status code internally
and to be hopefully more generic.
Previously, the stats admin page required POST parameters to be provided
exactly in the same order as the HTML form.
This patch allows to handle those parameters in any orders.
Also, note that haproxy won't alter server states anymore if backend or server
names are ambiguous (duplicated names in the configuration) to prevent
unexpected results (the same should probably be applied to the stats socket).
Commit a1cc38 introduced a regression which was easy to trigger till ad4cd58
(snapshots 20120222 to 20120311 included). The bug was still present after
that but harder to trigger.
The bug is caused by the use of two distinct log buffers due to intermediary
changes. The issue happens when an HTTP request is logged just after a TCP
request during the same second and the HTTP request is too large for the buffer.
In this case, it happens that the HTTP request is logged into the TCP buffer
instead and that length controls can't detect anything.
Starting with bddd4f, the issue is still possible when logging too large an
HTTP request just after a send_log() call (typically a server status change).
We owe a big thanks to Sander Klein for testing several snapshots and more
specifically for taking significant risks in production by letting the buggy
version crash several times in order to provide an exploitable core ! The bug
could not have been found without this precious help. Thank you Sander !
This fix does not need to be backported, it did not affect any released version.
Merge http_sess_log() and tcp_sess_log() to sess_log() and move it to
log.c
A new field in logformat_type define if you can use a logformat
variable in TCP or HTTP mode.
doc: log-format in tcp mode
Note that due to the way log buffer allocation currently works, trying to
log an HTTP request without "option httplog" is still not possible. This
will change in the near future.
A number of offset computation functions use struct buffer* arguments
and return integers without modifying the input. Using consts helps
simplifying some operations in callers.
The principle behind this load balancing algorithm was first imagined
and modeled by Steen Larsen then iteratively refined through several
work sessions until it would totally address its original goal.
The purpose of this algorithm is to always use the smallest number of
servers so that extra servers can be powered off during non-intensive
hours. Additional tools may be used to do that work, possibly by
locally monitoring the servers' activity.
The first server with available connection slots receives the connection.
The servers are choosen from the lowest numeric identifier to the highest
(see server parameter "id"), which defaults to the server's position in
the farm. Once a server reaches its maxconn value, the next server is used.
It does not make sense to use this algorithm without setting maxconn. Note
that it can however make sense to use minconn so that servers are not used
at full load before starting new servers, and so that introduction of new
servers requires a progressively increasing load (the number of servers
would more or less follow the square root of the load until maxconn is
reached). This algorithm ignores the server weight, and is more beneficial
to long sessions such as RDP or IMAP than HTTP, though it can be useful
there too.
http_sess_log now use the logformat linked list to make the log
string, snprintf is not used for speed issue.
CLF mode also uses logformat.
NOTE: as of now, empty fields in CLF now are "" not "-" anymore.
parse_logformat_string: parse the string, detect the type: text,
separator or variable
parse_logformat_var: dectect variable name
parse_logformat_var_args: parse arguments and flags
add_to_logformat_list: add to the logformat linked list
send_log function is now splited in 3 functions
* hdr_log: generate the syslog header
* send_log: send a syslog message with a printf format string
* __send_log: send a syslog message
It was reported that a server configured with a zero weight would
sometimes still take connections from the backend queue. This issue is
real, it happens this way :
1) the disabled server accepts a request with a cookie
2) many cookie-less requests accumulate in the backend queue
3) when the disabled server completes its request, it checks its own
queue and the backend's queue
4) the server takes a pending request from the backend queue and
processes it. In response, the server's cookie is assigned to
the client, which ensures that some requests will continue to
be served by this server, leading back to point 1 above.
The fix consists in preventing a zero-weight server from dequeuing pending
requests from the backend. Making use of srv_is_usable() in such tests makes
the tests more robust against future changes.
This fix must be backported to 1.4 and 1.3.
In a config where server "s1" is marked disabled and "s2" tracks "s1",
s2 appears disabled on the stats but is still inserted into the LB farm
because the tracking is resolved too late in the configuration process.
We now resolve tracked servers before building LB maps and we also mark
the tracking server in maintenance mode, which previously was not done,
causing half of the issue.
Last point is that we also protect srv_is_usable() against electing a
server marked for maintenance. This is not absolutely needed but is a
safe choice and makes a lot of sense.
This fix must be backported to 1.4.
New option "http-send-name-header" specifies the name of a header which
will hold the server name in outgoing requests. This is the name of the
server the connection is really sent to, which means that upon redispatches,
the header's value is updated so that it always matches the server's name.
The new function does not return IP addresses but header values instead,
so that the caller is free to make what it want of them. The conversion
is not quite clean yet, as the previous test which considered that address
0.0.0.0 meant "no address" is still used. A different IP parsing function
should be used to take this into account.
In commit 4b517ca93a (MEDIUM: buffers:
add some new primitives and rework existing ones), we forgot to check
if buffer_max_len() < l.
No backport is needed.
A number of primitives were missing for buffer management, and some
of them were particularly awkward to use. Specifically, the functions
used to compute free space could not always be used depending what was
wrapping in the buffers. Some documentation has been added about how
the buffers work and their properties. Some functions are still missing
such as a buffer replacement which would support wrapping buffers.
It makes no sense to have one pointer to the hdr_idx pool in each proxy
struct since these pools do not depend on the proxy. Let's have a common
pool instead as it is already the case for other types.
Stream interfaces used to distinguish between client and server addresses
because they were previously of different types (sockaddr_storage for the
client, sockaddr_in for the server). This is not the case anymore, and this
distinction is confusing at best and has caused a number of regressions to
be introduced in the process of converting everything to full-ipv6. We can
now remove this and have a much cleaner code.
This patch introduces hdr_len, path_len and url_len for matching these
respective parts lengths against integers. This can be used to detect
abuse or empty headers.
We already had the ability to kill a connection, but it was only
for the checks. Now we can do this for any session, and for this we
add a specific flag "K" to the logs.
The stats socket now allows the admin to disable, enable or shutdown a frontend.
This can be used when a bug is discovered in a configuration and it's desirable
to fix it but the rules in place don't allow to change a running config. Thus it
becomes possible to kill the frontend to release the port and start a new one in
a separate process.
This can also be used to temporarily make haproxy return TCP resets to incoming
requests to pretend the service is not bound. For instance, this may be useful
to quickly flush a very deep SYN backlog.
The frontend check and lookup code was factored with the "set maxconn" usage.
This one enforces a per-process connection rate limit, regardless of what
may be set per frontend. It can be a way to limit the CPU usage of a process
being severely attacked.
The side effect is that the global process connection rate is now measured
for each incoming connection, so it will be possible to report it.
This was revealed with one of the very latest patches which caused
the listener_queue not to be initialized on the stats socket frontend.
And in fact a number of other ones were missing too. This is getting so
boring that now we'll always make use of the same function to initialize
any proxy. Doing so has even saved about 500 bytes on the binary due to
the avoided code redundancy.
No backport is needed.
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.
When a listeners encounters a resource shortage, it currently stops until
one re-enables it. This is far from being perfect as it does not yet handle
the case where the single connection from the listener is rejected (eg: the
stats page).
Now we'll have a special status for resource limited listeners and we'll
queue them into one or multiple lists. That way, each time we have to stop
a listener because of a resource shortage, we can enqueue it and change its
state, so that it is dequeued once more resources are available.
This patch currently does not change any existing behaviour, it only adds
the basic building blocks for doing that.
Managing listeners state is difficult because they have their own state
and can at the same time have theirs dictated by their proxy. The pause
is not done properly, as the proxy code is fiddling with sockets. By
introducing new functions such as pause_listener()/resume_listener(), we
make it a bit more obvious how/when they're supposed to be used. The
listen_proxies() function was also renamed to resume_proxies() since
it's only used for pause/resume.
This patch is the first in a series aiming at getting rid of the maintain_proxies
mess. In the end, proxies should not call enable_listener()/disable_listener()
anymore.
Patch af5149 introduced an issue which can be detected only on out of
memory conditions : a LIST_DEL() may be performed on an uninitialized
struct member instead of a LIST_INIT() during the accept() phase,
causing crashes and memory corruption to occur.
This issue was detected and diagnosed by the Exceliance R&D team.
This is 1.5-specific and very recent, so no existing deployment should
be impacted.
The motivation for this is to allow iteration of all the connections
of a server without the expense of iterating over the global list
of connections.
The first use of this will be to implement an option to close connections
associated with a server when is is marked as being down or in maintenance
mode.
* The declaration of peer_session_create() does
not match its definition. As it is only
used inside of peers.c make it static.
* Make the declaration of peers_register_table()
match its definition.
* Also, make all functions in peers.c that
are not also in peers.h static
Since IPv6 is a different type than IPv4, the pattern fetch functions
src6 and dst6 were added. IPv6 stick-tables can also fetch IPv4 addresses
with src and dst. In this case, the IPv4 addresses are mapped to their
IPv6 counterpart, according to RFC 4291.
Since the latest additions to buffer_forward(), it became too large for
inlining, so let's uninline it. The code size drops by 3kB. Should be
backported to 1.4 too.
Despite much care around handling the content-length as a 64-bit integer,
forwarding was broken on 32-bit platforms due to the 32-bit nature of
the ->to_forward member of the "buffer" struct. The issue is that this
member is declared as a long, so while it works OK on 64-bit platforms,
32-bit truncate the content-length to the lower 32-bits.
One solution could consist in turning to_forward to a long long, but it
is used a lot in the critical path, so it's not acceptable to perform
all buffer size computations on 64-bit there.
The fix consists in changing the to_forward member to a strict 32-bit
integer and ensure in buffer_forward() that only the amount of bytes
that can fit into it is considered. Callers of buffer_forward() are
responsible for checking that their data were taken into account. We
arbitrarily ensure we never consider more than 2G at once.
That's the way it was intended to work on 32-bit platforms except that
it did not.
This issue was tracked down hard at Exosec with Bertrand Jacquin,
Thierry Fournier and Julien Thomas. It remained undetected for a long
time because files larger than 4G are almost always transferred in
chunked-encoded format, and most platforms dealing with huge contents
these days run on 64-bit.
The bug affects all 1.5 and 1.4 versions, and must be backported.
And also rename "req_acl_rule" "http_req_rule". At the beginning that
was a bit confusing to me, especially the "req_acl" list which in fact
holds what we call rules. After some digging, it appeared that some
part of the code is 100% HTTP and not just related to authentication
anymore, so let's move that part to HTTP and keep the auth-only code
in auth.c.
It's very annoying that frontend and backend stats are merged because we
don't know what we're observing. For instance, if a "listen" instance
makes use of a distinct backend, it's impossible to know what the bytes_out
means.
Some points take care of not updating counters twice if the backend points
to the frontend, indicating a "listen" instance. The thing becomes more
complex when we try to add support for server side keep-alive, because we
have to maintain a pointer to the backend used for last request, and to
update its stats. But we can't perform such comparisons anymore because
the counters will not match anymore.
So in order to get rid of this situation, let's have both frontend AND
backend stats in the "struct proxy". We simply update the relevant ones
during activity. Some of them are only accounted for in the backend,
while others are just for frontend. Maybe we can improve a bit on that
later, but the essential part is that those counters now reflect what
they really mean.
This patch turns internal server addresses to sockaddr_storage to
store IPv6 addresses, and makes the connect() function use it. This
code already works but some caveats with getaddrinfo/gethostbyname
still need to be sorted out while the changes had to be merged at
this stage of internal architecture changes. So for now the config
parser will not emit an IPv6 address yet so that user experience
remains unchanged.
This change should have absolutely zero user-visible effect, otherwise
it's a bug introduced during the merge, that should be reported ASAP.
This one has been removed and is now totally superseded by ->target.
To get the server, one must use target_srv(&s->target) instead of
s->srv now.
The function ensures that non-server targets still return NULL.
This is in fact where those parts belong to. The old data_state was replaced
by applet.state and is now initialized when the applet is registered. It's
worth noting that the applet does not need to know the session nor the
buffer anymore since everything is brought by the stream interface.
It is possible that having a separate applet struct would simplify the
code but that's not a big deal.
When doing a connect() on a stream interface, some information is needed
from the server and from the backend. In some situations, we don't have
a server and only a backend (eg: peers). In other cases, we know we have
an applet and we don't want to connect to anything, but we'd still like
to have the info about the applet being used.
For this, we now store a pointer to the "target" into the stream interface.
The target describes what's on the other side before trying to connect. It
can be a server, a proxy or an applet for now. Later we'll probably have
descriptors for multiple-stage chains so that the final information may
still be found.
This will help removing many specific cases in the code. It already made
it possible to remove the "srv" and "be" parameters to tcpv4_connect_server().
I/O handlers are still delicate to manipulate. They have no type, they're
just raw functions which have no knowledge of themselves. Let's have them
declared as applets once for all. That way we can have multiple applets
share the same handler functions and we can store their names there. When
we later need to add more parameters (eg: usage stats), we'll be able to
do so in the applets themselves.
The CLI functions has been prefixed with "cli" instead of "stats" as it's
clearly what is going on there.
The applet descriptor in the stream interface should get all the applet
specific data (st0, ...) but this will be done in the next patch so that
we don't pollute this one too much.
Debugging parsing errors can be greatly improved if we know what the parser
state was and what the buffer flags were (especially for closed inputs/outputs
and full buffers). Let's add that to the error snapshots.
Enhance pattern convs and fetch argument parsing, now fetchs and convs callbacks used typed args.
Add more details on error messages on parsing pattern expression function.
Update existing pattern convs and fetchs to new proto.
Create stick table key type "binary".
Manage Truncation and padding if pattern's fetch-converted result don't match table key size.
The introduction of a new PROXY protocol for proxied connections requires
an early analyser to decode the incoming connection and set the session
flags accordingly.
Some more work is needed, among which setting a flag on the session to
indicate it's proxied, and copying the original parameters for later
comparisons with new ACLs (eg: real_src, ...).
The stats web interface must be read-only by default to prevent security
holes. As it is now allowed to enable/disable servers, a new keyword
"stats admin" is introduced to activate this admin level, conditioned by ACLs.
(cherry picked from commit 5334bab92ca7debe36df69983c19c21b6dc63f78)
Based on a patch provided by Judd Montgomery, it is now possible to
enable/disable servers from the stats web interface. This allows to select
several servers in a backend and apply the action to them at the same time.
Currently, there are 2 known limitations :
- The POST data are limited to one packet
(don't alter too many servers at a time).
- Expect: 100-continue is not supported.
(cherry picked from commit 7693948766cb5647ac03b48e782cfee2b1f14491)
There was no consistency between all the functions used to exchange data
between a buffer and a stream interface. Also, the functions used to send
data to a buffer did not consider the possibility that the buffer was
shutdown for read.
Now the functions are called buffer_{put,get}_{char,block,chunk,string}.
The old buffer_feed* functions have been left available for existing code
but marked deprecated.
Signal zero is never delivered by the system. However having a signal to
which functions and tasks can subscribe to be notified of a stopping event
is useful. So this patch does two things :
1) allow signal zero to be delivered from any function of signal handler
2) make soft_stop() deliver this signal so that tasks can be notified of
a stopping condition.
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);
In case of HTTP keepalive processing, we want to release the counters tracked
by the backend. Till now only the second set of counters was released, while
it could have been assigned by the frontend, or the backend could also have
assigned the first set. Now we reuse to unused bits of the session flags to
mark which stick counters were assigned by the backend and to release them as
appropriate.
The assumption that there was a 1:1 relation between tracked counters and
the frontend/backend role was wrong. It is perfectly possible to track the
track-fe-counters from the backend and the track-be-counters from the
frontend. Thus, in order to reduce confusion, let's remove this useless
{fe,be} reference and simply use {1,2} instead. The keywords have also been
renamed in order to limit confusion. The ACL rule action now becomes
"track-sc{1,2}". The ACLs are now "sc{1,2}_*" instead of "trk{fe,be}_*".
That means that we can reasonably document "sc1" and "sc2" (sticky counters
1 and 2) as sort of patterns that are available during the whole session's
life and use them just like any other pattern.
Having a single tracking pointer for both frontend and backend counters
does not work. Instead let's have one for each. The keyword has changed
to "track-be-counters" and "track-fe-counters", and the ACL "trk_*"
changed to "trkfe_*" and "trkbe_*".
It's a bit cumbersome to have to know all possible storable types
from the stats interface. Instead, let's have generic types for
all data, which will facilitate their manipulation.
It is now possible to dump a table's contents with keys, expire,
use count, and various data using the command above on the stats
socket.
"show table" only shows main table stats, while "show table <name>"
dumps table contents, only if the socket level is admin.
This patch adds support for the following session counters :
- http_req_cnt : HTTP request count
- http_req_rate: HTTP request rate
- http_err_cnt : HTTP request error count
- http_err_rate: HTTP request error rate
The equivalent ACLs have been added to check the tracked counters
for the current session or the counters of the current source.
This function looks up a key, updates its expiration date, or creates
it if it was not found. acl_fetch_src_updt_conn_cnt() was updated to
make use of it.
These counters maintain incoming connection rates and session rates
in a stick-table, over a period which is defined in the configuration
(2 ms to 24 days). They can be used to detect service abuse and
enforce a certain accept rate per source address for instance, and
block if the rate is passed over.
Example :
# block if more than 50 requests per 5 seconds from a source.
stick-table type ip size 200k expire 1m store conn_rate(5s),sess_rate(5s)
tcp-request track-counters src
tcp-request reject if { trk_conn_rate gt 50 }
# cause a 3 seconds pause to requests from sources in excess of 20 requests/5s
tcp-request inspect-delay 3s
tcp-request content accept if { trk_sess_rate gt 20 } WAIT_END
We're now able to return errors based on the validity of an argument
passed to a stick-table store data type. We also support ARG_T_DELAY
to pass delays to stored data types (eg: for rate counters).
Some data types will require arguments (eg: period for a rate counter).
This patch adds support for such arguments between parenthesis in the
"store" directive of the stick-table statement. Right now only integers
are supported.
When a session tracks a counter, automatically increase the cumulated
connection count. This makes src_updt_conn_cnt() almost useless. In
fact it might still be used to update different tables.
The new "conn_cur" session counter has been added. It is automatically
updated upon "track XXX" directives, and the entry is touched at the
moment we increment the value so that we don't consider further counter
updates as real updates, otherwise we would end up updating upon completion,
which may not be desired. Probably that some other event counters (eg: HTTP
requests) will have to be updated upon each event though.
This counter can be matched against current session's source address using
the "src_conn_cur" ACL.
This patch adds the ability to set a pointer in the session to an
entry in a stick table which holds various counters related to a
specific pattern.
Right now the syntax matches the target syntax and only the "src"
pattern can be specified, to track counters related to the session's
IPv4 source address. There is a special function to extract it and
convert it to a key. But the goal is to be able to later support as
many patterns as for the stick rules, and get rid of the specific
function.
The "track-counters" directive may only be set in a "tcp-request"
statement right now. Only the first one applies. Probably that later
we'll support multi-criteria tracking for a single session and that
we'll have to name tracking pointers.
No counter is updated right now, only the refcount is. Some subsequent
patches will have to bring that feature.
The buffer_feed* functions that are used to send data to buffers did only
support sending contiguous chunks while they're relying on memcpy(). This
patch improves on this by making them able to write in two chunks if needed.
Thus, the buffer_almost_full() function has been improved to really consider
the remaining space and not just what can be written at once.
Some freq counters will have to work on periods different from 1 second.
The original freq counters rely on the period to be exactly one second.
The new ones (freq_ctr_period) let the user define the period in ticks,
and all computations are operated over that period. When reading a value,
it indicates the amount of events over that period too.
When an entry already exists, we just need to update its expiration
timer. Let's have a dedicated function for that instead of spreading
open code everywhere.
This change also ensures that an update of an existing sticky session
really leads to an update of its expiration timer, which was apparently
not the case till now. This point needs to be checked in 1.4.
Till now sticky sessions only held server IDs. Now there are other
data types so it is not acceptable anymore to overwrite the server ID
when writing something. The server ID must then only be written from
the caller when appropriate. Doing this has also led to separate
lookup and storage.
The stick_tables will now be able to store extra data for a same key.
A limited set of extra data types will be defined and for each of them
an offset in the sticky session will be assigned at startup time. All
of this information will be stored in the stick table.
The extra data types will have to be specified after the new "store"
keyword of the "stick-table" directive, which will reserve some space
for them.
pattern.c depended on stick_table while in fact it should be the opposite.
So we move from pattern.c everything related to stick_tables and invert the
dependency. That way the code becomes more logical and intuitive.
Right now we're only able to store a server ID in a sticky session.
The goal is to be able to store anything whose size is known at startup
time. For this, we store the extra data before the stksess pointer,
using a negative offset. It will then be easy to cumulate multiple
data provided they each have their own offset.
Now we're able to reject connections very early, so we need to use a
different counter for the connections that are received and the ones
that are accepted and converted into sessions, so that the rate limits
can still apply to the accepted ones. The session rate must still be
used to compute the rate limit, so that we can reject undesired traffic
without affecting the rate.
A new function session_accept() is now called from the lower layer to
instanciate a new session. Once the session is instanciated, the upper
layer's frontent_accept() is called. This one can be service-dependant.
That way, we have a 3-phase accept() sequence :
1) protocol-specific, session-less accept(), which is pointed to by
the listener. It defaults to the generic stream_sock_accept().
2) session_accept() which relies on a frontend but not necessarily
for use in a proxy (eg: stats or any future service).
3) frontend_accept() which performs the accept for the service
offerred by the frontend. It defaults to frontend_accept() which
is really what is used by a proxy.
The TCP/HTTP proxies have been moved to this mode so that we can now rely on
frontend_accept() for any type of session initialization relying on a frontend.
The next step will be to convert the stats to use the same system for the stats.
It's not normal to initialize the server-side stream interface from the
accept() function, because it may change later. Thus, we introduce a new
stream_sock_prepare_interface() function which is called just before the
connect() and which sets all of the stream_interface's callbacks to the
default ones used for real sockets. The ->connect function is also set
at the same instant so that we can easily add new server-side protocols
soon.
The new LI_O_TCP_RULES listener option indicates that some TCP rules
must be checked upon accept on this listener. It is now checked by
the frontend and the L4 rules are evaluated only in this case. The
flag is only set when at least one tcp-req rule is present in the
frontend.
The L4 rules check function has now been moved to proto_tcp.c where
it ought to be.
For a long time we had two large accept() functions, one for TCP
sockets instanciating proxies, and another one for UNIX sockets
instanciating the stats interface.
A lot of code was duplicated and both did not work exactly the same way.
Now we have a stream_sock layer accept() called for either TCP or UNIX
sockets, and this function calls the frontend-specific accept() function
which does the rest of the frontend-specific initialisation.
Some code is still duplicated (session & task allocation, stream interface
initialization), and might benefit from having an intermediate session-level
accept() callback to perform such initializations. Still there are some
minor differences that need to be addressed first. For instance, the monitor
nets should only be checked for proxies and not for other connection templates.
Last, we renamed l->private as l->frontend. The "private" pointer in
the listener is only used to store a frontend, so let's rename it to
eliminate this ambiguity. When we later support detached listeners
(eg: FTP), we'll add another field to avoid the confusion.
The 'client.c' file now only contained frontend-specific functions,
so it has naturally be renamed 'frontend.c'. Same for client.h. This
has also been an opportunity to remove some cross references from
files that should not have depended on it.
In the end, this file should contain a protocol-agnostic accept()
code, which would initialize a session, task, etc... based on an
accept() from a lower layer. Right now there are still references
to TCP.
Some functions which act on generic buffer contents without being
tcp-specific were historically in proto_tcp.c. This concerns ACLs
and RDP cookies. Those have been moved away to more appropriate
locations. Ideally we should create some new files for each layer6
protocol parser. Let's do that later.
Using get_ip_from_hdr2() we can look for occurrence #X or #-X and
extract the IP it contains. This is typically designed for use with
the X-Forwarded-For header.
Using "usesrc hdr_ip(name,occ)", it becomes possible to use the IP address
found in <name>, and possibly specify occurrence number <occ>, as the
source to connect to a server. This is possible both in a server and in
a backend's source statement. This is typically used to use the source
IP previously set by a upstream proxy.
The transparent proxy address selection was set in the TCP connect function
which is not the most appropriate place since this function has limited
access to the amount of parameters which could produce a source address.
Instead, now we determine the source address in backend.c:connect_server(),
right after calling assign_server_address() and we assign this address in
the session and pass it to the TCP connect function. This cannot be performed
in assign_server_address() itself because in some cases (transparent mode,
dispatch mode or http_proxy mode), we assign the address somewhere else.
This change will open the ability to bind to addresses extracted from many
other criteria (eg: from a header).
The following patch fixed an issue but brought another one :
296897 [MEDIUM] connect to servers even when the input has already been closed
The new issue is that when a connection is inspected and aborted using
TCP inspect rules, now it is sent to the server before being closed. So
that test is not satisfying. A probably better way is not to prevent a
connection from establishing if only BF_SHUTW_NOW is set but BF_SHUTW
is not. That way, the BF_SHUTW flag is not set if the request has any
data pending, which still fixes the stats issue, but does not let any
empty connection pass through.
Also, as a safety measure, we extend buffer_abort() to automatically
disable the BF_AUTO_CONNECT flag. While it appears to always be OK,
it is by pure luck, so better safe than sorry.
The trash buffer may now be smaller than a buffer because we can tune
it at run time. This causes a risk when we're trying to use it as a
temporary buffer to realign unaligned requests, because we may have to
put up to a full buffer into it.
Instead of doing a double copy, we're now relying on an open-coded
bouncing copy algorithm. The principle is that we move one byte at
a time to its final place, and if that place also holds a byte, then
we move it too, and so on. We finish when we've moved all the buffer.
It limits the number of memory accesses, but since it proceeds one
byte at a time and with random walk, it's not cache friendly and
should be slower than a double copy. However, it's only used in
extreme situations and the difference will not be noticeable.
It has been extensively tested and works reliably.
This is a first attempt to add a maintenance mode on servers, using
the stat socket (in admin level).
It can be done with the following command :
- disable server <backend>/<server>
- enable server <backend>/<server>
In this mode, no more checks will be performed on the server and it
will be marked as a special DOWN state (MAINT).
If some servers were tracking it, they'll go DOWN until the server
leaves the maintenance mode. The stats page and the CSV export also
display this special state.
This can be used to disable the server in haproxy before doing some
operations on this server itself. This is a good complement to the
"http-check disable-on-404" keyword and works in TCP mode.
Support the new syntax (http-request allow/deny/auth) in
http stats.
Now it is possible to use the same syntax is the same like in
the frontend/backend http-request access control:
acl src_nagios src 192.168.66.66
acl stats_auth_ok http_auth(L1)
stats http-request allow if src_nagios
stats http-request allow if stats_auth_ok
stats http-request auth realm LB
The old syntax is still supported, but now it is emulated
via private acls and an aditional userlist.
Add generic authentication & authorization support.
Groups are implemented as bitmaps so the count is limited to
sizeof(int)*8 == 32.
Encrypted passwords are supported with libcrypt and crypt(3), so it is
possible to use any method supported by your system. For example modern
Linux/glibc instalations support MD5/SHA-256/SHA-512 and of course classic,
DES-based encryption.
Just as for the req* rules, we can now condition rsp* rules with ACLs.
ACLs match on response, so volatile request information cannot be used.
A warning is emitted if a configuration contains such an anomaly.
From now on, if request filters have ACLs defined, these ACLs will be
evaluated to condition the filter. This will be used to conditionally
remove/rewrite headers based on ACLs.
This function automatically builds a rule, considering the if/unless
statements, and automatically updates the proxy's acl_requires, the
condition's file and line.
Calling this function after http_find_header2() automatically deletes
the current value of the header, and removes the header itself if the
value is the only one. The context is automatically adjusted for a
next call to http_find_header2() to return the next header. No other
change nor test should be made on the transient context though.
The stream_int_cond_close() function was added to preserve the
contents of the response buffer because stream_int_retnclose()
was buggy. It flushed the response instead of flushing the
request. This caused issues with pipelined redirects followed
by error messages which ate the previous response.
This might even have caused object truncation on pipelined
requests followed by an error or by a server redirection.
Now that this is fixed, simply get rid of the now useless
function.
Several HTTP analysers used to set those flags to values that
were useful but without considering the possibility that they
were not called again to clean what they did. First, replace
direct flag manipulation with more explicit macros. Second,
enforce a rule stating that any buffer which changes one of
these flags from the default must restore it after completion,
so that other analysers see correct flags.
With both this fix and the previous one about analyser bits,
we should not see any more stuck sessions.
Supported informations, available via "tr/td title":
- cap: capabilities (proxy)
- mode: one of tcp, http or health (proxy)
- id: SNMP ID (proxy, socket, server)
- IP (socket, server)
- cookie (backend, server)
The body parser will be used in close and keep-alive modes. It follows
the stream to keep in sync with both the request and the response message.
Both chunked transfer-coding and content-length are supported according to
RFC2616.
The multipart/byterange encoding has not yet been implemented and if not
seconded by any of the two other ones, will be forwarded till the close,
as requested by the specification.
Both the request and the response analysers converge into an HTTP_MSG_DONE
state where it will be possible to force a close (option forceclose) or to
restart with a fresh new transaction and maintain keep-alive.
This change is important. All tests are OK but any possible behaviour
change with "option httpclose" might find its root here.
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().
Implement decreasing health based on observing communication between
HAProxy and servers.
Changes in this version 2:
- documentation
- close race between a started check and health analysis event
- don't force fastinter if it is not set
- better names for options
- layer4 support
Changes in this version 3:
- add stats
- port to the current 1.4 tree
To sum up :
- len : it's now the max number of characters for the value, preventing
garbaged results.
- a new option "prefix" is added, this allows to use dynamic cookie
names (e.g. ASPSESSIONIDXXX).
Previously in the thread, I wanted to use the value found with
"capture cookie" but when i started to update the documentation, I
found this solution quite weird. I've made a small rework to not
depend on "capture cookie".
- There's the posssiblity to define the URL parser mode (path parameters
or query string).
We now set msg->col and msg->sov to the first byte of non-header.
They will be used later when parsing chunks. A new macro was added
to perform size additions on an http_msg in order to limit the risks
of copy-paste in the long term.
During this operation, it appeared that the http_msg struct was not
optimal on 64-bit, so it was re-ordered to fill the holes.
Right now, an HTTP server cannot track a TCP server and vice-versa.
This patch enables proxy tracking without relying on the proxy's mode
(tcp/http/health). It only requires a matching proxy name to exist. The
original function was renamed to findproxy_mode().
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.
The code part which waits for an HTTP response has been extracted
from the old function. We now have two analysers and the second one
may re-enable the first one when an 1xx response is encountered.
This has been tested and works.
The calls to stream_int_return() that were remaining in the wait
analyser have been converted to stream_int_retnclose().
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).
This alone makes a typical HTML stats dump consume 10% CPU less,
because we avoid doing complex printf calls to drop them later.
Only a few common cases have been checked, those which are very
likely to run for nothing.
It is a bit expensive and complex to use to call buffer_feed()
directly from the request parser, and there are risks that some
output messages are lost in case of buffer full. Since most of
these messages are static, let's have a state dedicated to print
these messages and store them in a specific area shared with the
stats in the session. This both reduces code size and risks of
losing output data.
Add two functions to encode input chunk replacing
non-printable, non ascii or special characters
with:
"&#%u;" - chunk_htmlencode
"<%02X>" - chunk_asciiencode
Above functions should be used when adding strings, received
from possible unsafe sources, to html stats or logs.
int get_backend_server(const char *bk_name, const char *sv_name,
struct proxy **bk, struct server **sv);
This function scans the list of backends and servers to retrieve the first
backend and the first server with the given names, and sets them in both
parameters. It returns zero if either is not found, or non-zero and sets
the ones it did not found to NULL. If a NULL pointer is passed for the
backend, only the pointer to the server will be updated.
Consistent hashing provides some interesting advantages over common
hashing. It avoids full redistribution in case of a server failure,
or when expanding the farm. This has a cost however, the hashing is
far from being perfect, as we associate a server to a request by
searching the server with the closest key in a tree. Since servers
appear multiple times based on their weights, it is recommended to
use weights larger than approximately 10-20 in order to smoothen
the distribution a bit.
In some cases, playing with weights will be the only solution to
make a server appear more often and increase chances of being picked,
so stats are very important with consistent hashing.
In order to indicate the type of hashing, use :
hash-type map-based (default, old one)
hash-type consistent (new one)
Consistent hashing can make sense in a cache farm, in order not
to redistribute everyone when a cache changes state. It could also
probably be used for long sessions such as terminal sessions, though
that has not be attempted yet.
More details on this method of hashing here :
http://www.spiteful.com/2008/03/17/programmers-toolbox-part-3-consistent-hashing/
Recent "struct chunk rework" introduced a NULL pointer dereference
and now haproxy segfaults if auth is required for stats but not found.
The reason is that size_t cannot store negative values, but current
code assumes that "len < 0" == uninitialized.
This patch fixes it.
There are a few remaining max values that need to move to counters.
Also, the counters are more often used than some config information,
so get them closer to the other useful struct members for better cache
efficiency.
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.
Doing this, we can remove the last BF_HIJACK user and remove
produce_content(). s->data_source could also be removed but
it is currently used to detect if the stats or a server was
used.
The stats handler used to store internal states in s->ana_state. Now
we only rely on si->st0 in which we can store as many states as we
have possible outputs. This cleans up the stats code a lot and makes
it more maintainable. It has also reduced code size by a few hundred
bytes.
We can simplify the code in the stats functions using buffer_feed_chunk()
instead of buffer_write_chunk(). Let's start with this function. This
patch also fixed an issue where we could dump past the end of the capture
buffer if it is shorter than the captured request.
Calling buffer_shutw() marks the buffer as closed but if it was already
closed in the other direction, the stream interface is not marked as
closed, causing infinite loops.
We took this opportunity to completely remove buffer_shutw() and buffer_shutr()
which have no reason to be used at all and which will always cause trouble
when directly called. The stats occurrence was the last one.
We need to remove hash map accesses out of backend.c if we want to
later support new hash methods. This patch separates the hash computation
method from the server lookup. It leaves the lookup function to lb_map.c
and calls it with the result of the hash.
It was becoming painful to have all the LB algos in backend.c.
Let's move them to their own files. A few hashing functions still
need be broken in two parts, one for the contents and one for the
map position.
There is no reason to inline functions which are used to grab a server
depending on an LB algo. They are large and used at several places.
Uninlining them saves 400 bytes of code.
We can get rid of the stats analyser by moving all the stats code
to a stream interface applet. Above being cleaner, it provides new
advantages such as the ability to process requests and responses
from the same function and work only with simple state machines.
There's no need for any hijack hack anymore.
The direct advantage for the user are the interactive mode and the
ability to chain several commands delimited by a semi-colon. Now if
the user types "prompt", he gets a prompt from which he can send
as many requests as he wants. All outputs are terminated by a
blank line followed by a new prompt, so this can be used from
external tools too.
The code is not very clean, it needs some rework, but some part
of the dirty parts are due to the remnants of the hijack mode used
in the old functions we call.
The old AN_REQ_STATS_SOCK analyser flag is now unused and has been
removed.
It will soon be necessary to have stream interfaces running as part of
the current task, or as independant tasks. For instance when we want to
implement compression or SSL. It will also be used for applets running
as stream interfaces.
These new functions are used to perform exactly that. Note that it's
still not easy to write a simple echo applet and more functions will
likely be needed.
Those two functions did not correctly deal with full buffers and/or
buffers that wrapped around. Buffer_skip() was even able to incorrectly
set buf->w further than the end of buffer if its len argument was wrong,
and buffer_si_getline() was able to incorrectly return a length larger
than the effective buffer data available.
It's important that these functions set these flags themselves, otherwise
the callers will always have to do this, and there is no valid reason for
not doing it.
Collect information about last health check result,
including L7 code if possible (for example http or smtp
return code) and time took to finish last check.
Health check info is provided on both stats pages (html & csv)
and logged when a server is marked UP or DOWN. Currently active
check are marked with an asterisk, but only in html mode.
Currently there are 14 status codes:
UNK -> unknown
INI -> initializing
SOCKERR -> socket error
L4OK -> check passed on layer 4, no upper layers testing enabled
L4TOUT -> layer 1-4 timeout
L4CON -> layer 1-4 connection problem, for example "Connection refused"
(tcp rst) or "No route to host" (icmp)
L6OK -> check passed on layer 6
L6TOUT -> layer 6 (SSL) timeout
L6RSP -> layer 6 invalid response - protocol error
L7OK -> check passed on layer 7
L7OKC -> check conditionally passed on layer 7, for example
404 with disable-on-404
L7TOUT -> layer 7 (HTTP/SMTP) timeout
L7RSP -> layer 7 invalid response - protocol error
L7STS -> layer 7 response error, for example HTTP 5xx
In TCP, we don't want to forward chunks of data, we want to forward
indefinitely. This patch introduces a special value for the amount
of data to be forwarded. When buffer_forward() is called with
BUF_INFINITE_FORWARD, it configures the buffer to never stop
forwarding until the end.
The BF_EMPTY flag was once used to indicate an empty buffer. However,
it was used half the time as meaning the buffer is empty for the reader,
and half the time as meaning there is nothing left to send.
"nothing to send" is only indicated by "->send_max=0 && !pipe". Once
we fix this, we discover that the flag is not used anymore. So the
flags has been renamed BF_OUT_EMPTY and means exactly the condition
above, ie, there is nothing to send.
Doing so has allowed us to remove some unused tests for emptiness,
but also to uncover a certain amount of situations where the flag
was not correctly set or tested.
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.
By inlining this function and slightly reordering it, we can double
the getchar/putchar test throughput, and reduce its footprint by about
40 bytes. Also, it was the only non-inlined char-based function, which
now makes it more consistent this time.
This function is used to cut the "tail" of a buffer, which means strip it
to the length of unsent data only, and kill any remaining unsent data. Any
scheduled forwarding is stopped. This is mainly to be used to send error
messages after existing data. It does the same as buffer_erase() for buffers
without pending outgoing data.
The computations in buffer_forward() were only valid if buffer_forward()
was used on a buffer which had no more data scheduled for forwarding.
This is always the case right now so this bug is not yet triggered but
it will soon be. Now we correctly discount the bytes to be forwarded
from the data already present in the buffer.
This function works like a traditional putchar() except that it
can return 0 if the output buffer is full.
Now a basic character-based echo function would look like this, from
a stream interface :
while (1) {
c = buffer_si_peekchar(req);
if (c < 0)
break;
if (!buffer_si_putchar(res, c)) {
si->flags |= SI_FL_WAIT_ROOM;
break;
}
buffer_skip(req, 1);
req->flags |= BF_WRITE_PARTIAL;
res->flags |= BF_READ_PARTIAL;
}
The buffer_si_peekline() function is sort of a fgets() to be used from a
stream interface. It returns a complete line whenever possible, and does
not update the buffer's pointer, so that the reader is free to consume
what it wants to.
buffer_si_peekchar() only returns one character, and also needs a call
to buffer_skip() once the character is definitely consumed.
This functions act like their buffer_write*() counter-parts,
except that they're specifically designed to be used from a
stream interface handler, as they carefully check size limits
and automatically advance the read pointer depending on the
to_forward attribute.
buffer_feed_chunk() is an inline calling buffer_feed() as both
are the sames. For this reason, buffer_write_chunk() has also
been turned into an inline which calls buffer_write().
buffer_contig_space(), buffer_contig_data() and buffer_skip()
provide easy methods to extract/insert data from/into a buffer.
buffer_write() and buffer_write_chunk() currently do not check
max_len nor to_forward, so they will quickly become embarrassing
to use or will need an equivalent. The reason is that they are
used to build error messages which currently are not subject to
analysis.
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.
The remains of the stats socket code has nothing to do in proto_uxst
anymore and must move to dumpstats. The code is much cleaner and more
structured. It was also an opportunity to rename AN_REQ_UNIX_STATS
as AN_REQ_STATS_SOCK as the stats socket is no longer unix-specific
either.
The last item refering to stats in proto_uxst is the setting of the
task's nice value which should in fact come from the listener.
process_session() is now ready to handle unix stats sockets. This
first step works and old code has not been removed. A cleanup is
required. The stats handler is not unix socket-centric anymore and
should move to dumpstats.c.
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.
The new statement "persist rdp-cookie" enables RDP cookie
persistence. The RDP cookie is then extracted from the RDP
protocol, and compared against available servers. If a server
matches the RDP cookie, then it gets the connection.
The RDP protocol is quite simple and documented, which permits
an easy detection and extraction of cookies. It can be useful
to match the MSTS cookie which can contain the username specified
by the client.
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.
Some stream analysers might become generic enough to be called
for several bits. So we cannot have the analyser bit hard coded
into the analyser itself. Let's make the caller inform the callee.
We want to split several steps in HTTP processing so that
we can call individual analysers depending on what processing
we want to perform. The first step consists in splitting the
part that waits for a request from the rest.
This is a first step towards support of multiple configuration files.
Now readcfgfile() only reads a file in memory and performs very minimal
parsing. The checks are performed afterwards.
Some users are already hitting the 64k source port limit when
connecting to servers. The system usually maintains a list of
unused source ports, regardless of the source IP they're bound
to. So in order to go beyond the 64k concurrent connections, we
have to manage the source ip:port lists ourselves.
The solution consists in assigning a source port range to each
server and use a free port in that range when connecting to that
server, either for a proxied connection or for a health check.
The port must then be put back into the server's range when the
connection is closed.
This mechanism is used only when a port range is specified on
a server. It makes it possible to reach 64k connections per
server, possibly all from the same IP address. Right now it
should be more than enough even for huge deployments.
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.
These functions will be used to deliver asynchronous signals in order
to make the signal handling functions more robust. The goal is to keep
the same interface to signal handlers.
