The way the buffers and stream interfaces handled ->to_forward was
really not handy for multiple reasons. Now we've moved its control
to the receive-side of the buffer, which is also responsible for
keeping send_max up to date. This makes more sense as it now becomes
possible to send some pre-formatted data followed by forwarded data.
The following explanation has also been added to buffer.h to clarify
the situation. Right now, tests show that the I/O is behaving extremely
well. Some work will have to be done to adapt existing splice code
though.
/* Note about the buffer structure
The buffer contains two length indicators, one to_forward counter and one
send_max limit. First, it must be understood that the buffer is in fact
split in two parts :
- the visible data (->data, for ->l bytes)
- the invisible data, typically in kernel buffers forwarded directly from
the source stream sock to the destination stream sock (->splice_len
bytes). Those are used only during forward.
In order not to mix data streams, the producer may only feed the invisible
data with data to forward, and only when the visible buffer is empty. The
consumer may not always be able to feed the invisible buffer due to platform
limitations (lack of kernel support).
Conversely, the consumer must always take data from the invisible data first
before ever considering visible data. There is no limit to the size of data
to consume from the invisible buffer, as platform-specific implementations
will rarely leave enough control on this. So any byte fed into the invisible
buffer is expected to reach the destination file descriptor, by any means.
However, it's the consumer's responsibility to ensure that the invisible
data has been entirely consumed before consuming visible data. This must be
reflected by ->splice_len. This is very important as this and only this can
ensure strict ordering of data between buffers.
The producer is responsible for decreasing ->to_forward and increasing
->send_max. The ->to_forward parameter indicates how many bytes may be fed
into either data buffer without waking the parent up. The ->send_max
parameter says how many bytes may be read from the visible buffer. Thus it
may never exceed ->l. This parameter is updated by any buffer_write() as
well as any data forwarded through the visible buffer.
The consumer is responsible for decreasing ->send_max when it sends data
from the visible buffer, and ->splice_len when it sends data from the
invisible buffer.
A real-world example consists in part in an HTTP response waiting in a
buffer to be forwarded. We know the header length (300) and the amount of
data to forward (content-length=9000). The buffer already contains 1000
bytes of data after the 300 bytes of headers. Thus the caller will set
->send_max to 300 indicating that it explicitly wants to send those data,
and set ->to_forward to 9000 (content-length). This value must be normalised
immediately after updating ->to_forward : since there are already 1300 bytes
in the buffer, 300 of which are already counted in ->send_max, and that size
is smaller than ->to_forward, we must update ->send_max to 1300 to flush the
whole buffer, and reduce ->to_forward to 8000. After that, the producer may
try to feed the additional data through the invisible buffer using a
platform-specific method such as splice().
*/
In preparation of splice support, let's add the splice_len member
to the buffer struct. An earlier implementation made it conditional,
which made the whole logics very complex due to a large number of
ifdefs.
Now BF_EMPTY is only set once both buf->l and buf->splice_len are
null. Splice_len is initialized to zero during buffer creation and
is currently not changed, so the whole logics remains unaffected.
When splice gets merged, splice_len will reflect the number of bytes
in flight out of the buffer but not yet sent, typically in a pipe for
the Linux case.
If an analyser sets buf->to_forward to a given value, that many
data will be forwarded between the two stream interfaces attached
to a buffer without waking the task up. The same applies once all
analysers have been released. This saves a large amount of calls
to process_session() and a number of task_dequeue/queue.
By letting the producer tell the consumer there is data to check,
and the consumer tell the producer there is some space left again,
we can cut in half the number of session wakeups.
This is also an important starting point for future splicing support.
Sometimes we don't care about a read timeout, for instance, from the
client when waiting for the server, but we still want the client to
be able to read.
Till now it was done by articially forcing the read timeout to ETERNITY.
But this will cause trouble when we want the low level stream sock to
communicate without waking the session up. So we add a BF_READ_NOEXP
flag to indicate that when the read timeout is to be set, it might
have to be set to ETERNITY.
Since BF_READ_ENA was not used, we replaced this flag.
We don't want to report a buffer timeout if there was I/O activity
for the same events. That way we'll not have to always re-arm timeouts
on I/O, without the fear of a timeout triggering too fast.
For keep-alive, line-mode protocols and splicing, we will need to
limit the sender to process a certain amount of bytes. The limit
is automatically set to the buffer size when analysers are detached
from the buffer.
Kai Krueger found that previous patch was incomplete, because there is
an unconditionnal call to process_srv_queue() in session_free() which
still causes a dead server to consume pending connections from the
backend.
This call was made unconditionnal so that we don't leave unserved
connections in the server queue, for instance connections coming
in with "option persist" which can bypass the server status check.
However, the server must not touch the backend's queue if it is down.
Another fear was that some connections might remain unserved when
the server is using a dynamic maxconn if the number of connections
to the backend is too low. Right now, srv_dynamic_maxconn() ensures
this cannot happen, so the call can remain conditionnal.
The fix consists in allowing a server to process it own queue whatever
its state, but not to touch the backend's queue if it is down. Its
queue should normally be empty when the server is down because it is
redistributed when the server goes down. The only remaining cases are
precisely the persistent connections with "option persist" set, coming
in after the queue has been redispatched. Those ones must still be
processed when a connection terminates.
(cherry picked from commit cd485c4480)
Kai Krueger reported a problem when a server goes down with active
connections. A lot of connections were drained by that server. Kai
did an amazing job at tracking this bug down to the dequeuing
mechanism which forgets to check the server state before allowing
a request to be sent to a server.
The problem occurs more often with long requests, which have a chance
to complete after the server is completely marked down, and to find
requests in the global queue which have not yet been fetched by other
servers.
The fix consists in ensuring that a server is up before sending it
any new request from the queue.
(cherry picked from commit 80b286a064)
(cherry picked from commit 2e5e0d2853f059a1d09dc81fdbbad9fd03124a98)
It is now possible to set or clear a cookie during a redirection. This
is useful for logout pages, or for protecting against some DoSes. Check
the documentation for the options supported by the "redirect" keyword.
(cherry-picked from commit 4af993822e880d8c932f4ad6920db4c9242b0981)
If "drop-query" is present on a "redirect" line using the "prefix" mode,
then the returned Location header will be the request URI without the
query-string. This may be used on some login/logout pages, or when it
must be decided to redirect the user to a non-secure server.
(cherry-picked from commit f2d361ccd73aa16538ce767c766362dd8f0a88fd)
There is a problem when an instance is marked "disabled". Its ports are
still bound but will not be unbound upon termination. This causes processes
to accumulate during soft restarts, and might even cause failures to restart
new ones due to the inability to bind to the same port.
The ideal solution would be to bind all ports at the end of the configuration
parsing. An acceptable workaround is to unbind all listeners of disabled
proxies. This is what the current patch does.
(cherry picked from commit a944218e9c)
(cherry picked from commit 8cfebbb82b87345bade831920177077e7d25840a)
It is now possible to list all known sessions by issuing "show sess"
on the unix stats socket. The format is not much evolved but it is
very useful for debugging.
The doc has been updated to reflect the new keyword.
This is the first step in implementing a session dump tool.
A session dump will need restart points. It will be necessary for
it to get references to sessions which can be moved when the session
dies.
The principle is not that complex : when a session ends, it looks for
any potential back-references. If it finds any, then it moves them to
the next session in the list. The dump function will of course have
to restart from that new point.
This type will be used to maintain back-references to items which
are subject to move between accesses. Typical usage includes session
removal during a listing.
Both should process the response buffer equally. They now both
clear the hijack bit once done, and both receive a pointer to
the response buffer in their arguments.
Instead of calling a hard-coded function to produce data, let's
reference this function into the buffer and call it from there
when BF_HIJACK is set. This goes in the direction of more generic
session management code.
The listener referenced in the fd was only used to check the
listener state upon session termination. There was no guarantee
that the FD had not been reassigned by the moment it was processed,
so this was a bit racy. Having it in the session is more robust.
The unix protocol handler had not been updated during the last
stream_sock changes. This has been done now. There is still a
lot of duplicated code between session.c and proto_uxst.c due
to the way the session is handled. Session.c relies on the existence
of a frontend while it does not exist here.
It is easier to see the difference between the stats part (placed
in dumpstats.c) and the unix-stream part (in proto_uxst.c).
The hijacking function still needs to be dynamically set into the
response buffer, and some cleanup is still required, then all those
changes should be forward-ported to the HTTP part. Adding support
for new keywords should not cause trouble now.
It will be very convenient to have an analyser state in the session.
It will always be initialized to zero. The analysers can make use of
it, but must reset it to zero when they leave.
In order to achieve more generic accept() code, we can set the request
analysers at the listener registration time. It's better than doing it
during accept(), and allows more code reuse.
The TCP analyser has moved to proto_tcp.c. Breaking the function
has required finer use of the return value and adding some tests
to process_session().
It was a bit awkward to have session.c call return_srv_error() for
HTTP error messages related to servers. The function has been adapted
to be passed a pointer to the faulty stream interface, and is now a
pointer in the session. It is possible that in the future, it will
become a callback in the stream interface itself.
The new function looks like the previous one except that it operates
at the stream interface level and assumes an already closed SI.
Also remove some old unused occurrences of srv_close_with_err().
In order to avoid having to call per-protocol logging function directly
from session.c, it's better to assign the logging function when the session
is created. This also eliminates a test when the function is needed, and
opens the way to more complete logging functions.
proto_http.c was not suitable for session-related processing, it was
just convenient for the tranformation.
Some more splitting must occur: process_request/response in proto_http.c
must be split again per protocol, and the caller must run a list.
Some functions should be directly attached to the session or the buffer
(eg: perform_http_redirect, return_srv_error, http_sess_log).
All the processing has now completely been split in layers. As of
now, everything is still in process_session() which is not the right
place, but the code sequence works. Timeouts, retries, errors, all
work.
The shutdown sequence has been strictly applied: BF_SHUTR/BF_SHUTW
are only assigned by lower layers. Upper layers can only indicate
their wish to close using BF_SHUTR_NOW and BF_SHUTW_NOW.
When a shutdown is performed on a stream interface, the buffer flags
are updated accordingly and re-checked by upper layers. A lot of care
has been taken to ensure that aborts during intermediate connection
setups are correctly handled and shutdowns correctly propagated to
both buffers.
A future evolution would consist in ensuring that BF_SHUT?_NOW may
be set at any time, and applies only when the buffer is empty. This
might help with error messages, but might complicate the processing
of data remaining in buffers.
Some useless buffer flag combinations have been removed.
Stat counters are still broken (eg: per-server total number of sessions).
Error messages should be delayed to the close instant and be produced by
protocol.
Many functions must now move to proper locations.
Now the global variable 'sessions' will be a dual-linked list of all
known sessions. The list element is set at the beginning of the session
so that it's easier to follow them all with gdb.
Two new functions are used instead : buffer_check_{shutr,shutw}.
It is indeed more adequate to check for new closures only when the
buffer reports them.
Several remaining unclosed connections were detected after a test,
even before this patch, so a bug remains. To reproduce, try the
following during 30 seconds :
inject30l4 -n 20000 -l -t 1000 -P 10 -o 4 -u 100 -s 100 -G 127.0.0.1:8000/
There were rare situations where it was not easy to detect that a failed
session attempt had occurred and needed some server cleanup. In particular,
client aborts sometimes lead to session leaks on the server side.
A new state "SI_ST_DIS" (disconnected) has been introduced for this. When
a session has been closed at a stream interface but the server cleanup has
not occurred, this state is entered instead of CLO. The cleanup is then
performed there and the state goes to CLO.
A new diagram has been added to show possible stream_interface state
transitions that can occur in a stream-sock. It makes debugging easier.
It is quite hard to track when the current session has already been counted
or discounted from the server's total number of established sessions. For
this reason, we introduce a new session flag, SN_CURR_SESS, which indicates
if the current session is one of those reported by the server or not. It
simplifies session accounting and makes it far more robust. It also makes
it possible to perform a last-minute cleanup during session_free().
Right now, with this fix and a few more buffer transitions fixes, no session
were found to remain after a test.
Tracking connection status changes was hard, and some code was
redundant. A new SI_ST_CER state was added to the stream interface
to indicate a past connection error, and an SI_FL_ERR flag was
added to report past I/O error. The stream_sock code does not set
the connection to SI_ST_CLO anymore in case of I/O error, it's
the upper layer which does it. This makes it possible to know
exactly when the file descriptors are allocated.
The new SI_ST_CER state permitted to split tcp_connection_status()
in two parts, one processing SI_ST_CON and the other one SI_ST_CER.
Synchronous connection errors now make use of this last state, hence
eliminating duplicate code.
Some ib<->ob copy paste errors were found and fixed, and all entities
setting SI_ST_CLO also shut the buffers down.
Some of these stream_interface specific functions and structures
have migrated to a new stream_interface.c file.
Some types of errors are still not detected by the buffers. For
instance, let's assume the following scenario in one single pass
of process_session: a connection sits in SI_ST_TAR state during
a retry. At TAR expiration, a new connection attempt is made, the
connection is obtained and srv->cur_sess is increased. Then the
buffer timeout is fires and everything is cleared, the new state
becomes SI_ST_CLO. The cleaning code checks that previous state
was either SI_ST_CON or SI_ST_EST to release the connection. But
that's wrong because last state is still SI_ST_TAR. So the
server's connection count does not get decreased.
This means that prev_state must not be used, and must be replaced
by some transition detection instead of level detection.
The following debugging line was useful to track state changes :
fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d: cs=%d ss=%d(%d) rqf=0x%08x rpf=0x%08x\n", __FUNCTION__, __LINE__,
s->si[0].state, s->si[1].state, s->si[1].err_type, s->req->flags, s-> rep->flags);
The connection setup code has been refactored in order to
make it run only on low level (stream interface). Several
complicated functions have been removed from backend.c,
and we now have sess_update_stream_int() to manage
an assigned connection, sess_prepare_conn_req() to assign a
server to a connection request, perform_http_redirect() to
redirect instead of connecting to server, and return_srv_error()
to return connection error status messages.
The stream_interface status changes are checked before adjusting
buffer flags, so that the buffers can be informed about this lower
level update.
A new connection is initiated by changing si->state from SI_ST_INI
to SI_ST_REQ.
The code seems to work but is awfully dirty. Some functions need
to be moved, and the layering is not yet quite clear.
A lot of dead old code has simply been removed.
It was not practical to have QUEUE and TAR timers in buffers, as they caused
triggering of the timeout flags. Move them to the stream interface where they
belong.
Now we have almost two distinct parts between tcp and http.
Only the connection establishment code still requires some
resynchronization, the rest does not.
Those entries were really needed for cleaner and better code. Using them
has permitted to automatically close a file descriptor during a shut write,
reducing by 20% the number of calls to process_session() and derived
functions.
Process_session() does not need to know the file descriptor anymore, though
it still remains very complicated due to the special case for the connect
mode.
As of now, a stream socket does not directly wake up the task
but it does contact the stream interface which itself knows the
task. This allows us to perform a few cleanups upon errors and
shutdowns, which reduces the number of calls to data_update()
from 8 per session to 2 per session, and make all the functions
called in the process_session() loop completely swappable.
Some improvements are required. We need to provide a shutw()
function on stream interfaces so that one side which closes
its read part on an empty buffer can propagate the close to
the remote side.
The owner of an fd was initially a task but this was sometimes
casted to a (struct listener *). We'll soon need more types,
so void* is more appropriate.
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...
GCC 3 and above do not inline large functions, which is a problem
with ebtree where most core functions are inlined.
This simple patch has both reduced code size and increased speed.
It should be back-ported to ebtree.
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.
The buffer flags became a big bazaar. Re-arrange them
so that their names are more explicit and so that they
are more easily readable in hex form. Some aggregates
have also been adjusted.
It was a waste to constantly update the file descriptor's status
and timeouts during a flags update. So stream_sock_process_data
has been slit in two parts :
stream_sock_data_update() => computes updated flags
stream_sock_data_finish() => computes timeouts
Only the first one is called during flag updates. The second one
is only called upon completion. The number of calls to fd_set/fd_clr
has now significantly dropped.
Also, it's useless to check for errors and timeouts in the
process_session() loop, it's enough to check for them at the
beginning.
The client side now relies on stream_sock_process_data(). One
part has not yet been re-implemented, it concerns the calls
to produce_content().
process_session() has been adjusted to correctly check for
changing bits in order not to call useless functions too many
times.
It already appears that stream_sock_process_data() should be
split so that the timeout computations are only performed at
the exit of process_session().
srv_state has been removed from HTTP state machines, and states
have been split in either TCP states or analyzers. For instance,
the TARPIT state has just become a simple analyzer.
New flags have been added to the struct buffer to compensate this.
The high-level stream processors sometimes need to force a disconnection
without touching a file-descriptor (eg: report an error). But if
they touched BF_SHUTW or BF_SHUTR, the file descriptor would not
be closed. Thus, the two SHUT?_NOW flags have been added so that
an application can request a forced close which the stream interface
will be forced to obey.
During this change, a new BF_HIJACK flag was added. It will
be used for data generation, eg during a stats dump. It
prevents the producer on a buffer from sending data into it.
BF_SHUTR_NOW /* the producer must shut down for reads ASAP */
BF_SHUTW_NOW /* the consumer must shut down for writes ASAP */
BF_HIJACK /* the producer is temporarily replaced */
BF_SHUTW_NOW has precedence over BF_HIJACK. BF_HIJACK has
precedence over BF_MAY_FORWARD (so that it does not need it).
New functions buffer_shutr_now(), buffer_shutw_now(), buffer_abort()
are provided to manipulate BF_SHUT* flags.
A new type "stream_interface" has been added to describe both
sides of a buffer. A stream interface has states and error
reporting. The session now has two stream interfaces (one per
side). Each buffer has stream_interface pointers to both
consumer and producer sides.
The server-side file descriptor has moved to its stream interface,
so that even the buffer has access to it.
process_srv() has been split into three parts :
- tcp_get_connection() obtains a connection to the server
- tcp_connection_failed() tests if a previously attempted
connection has succeeded or not.
- process_srv_data() only manages the data phase, and in
this sense should be roughly equivalent to process_cli.
Little code has been removed, and a lot of old code has been
left in comments for now.
Gcc < 3 does not consider regparm declarations for function pointers.
This causes big trouble at least with pollers (and with any function
pointer after all). Disable CONFIG_HAP_USE_REGPARM for gcc < 3.
It's a shame not to use buffer->wex for connection timeouts since by
definition it cannot be used till the connection is not established.
Using it instead of ->cex also makes the buffer processing more
symmetric.
It is not always convenient to run checks on req->l in functions to
check if a buffer is empty or full. Now the stream_sock functions
set flags BF_EMPTY and BF_FULL according to the buffer contents. Of
course, functions which touch the buffer contents adjust the flags
too.
BF_SHUTR_PENDING and BF_SHUTW_PENDING were poor ideas because
BF_SHUTR is the pending of BF_SHUTW_DONE and BF_SHUTW is the
pending of BF_SHUTR_DONE. Remove those two useless and confusing
"pending" versions and rename buffer_shut{r,w}_* functions.
It wasn't really wise to separate BF_MAY_CONNECT and BF_MAY_FORWARD,
as it caused trouble in TCP mode because the connection was allowed
but not the forwarding. Remove BF_MAY_CONNECT.
A new member has been added to the struct session. It keeps a trace
of what block of code performs a close or a shutdown on a socket, and
in what sequence. This is extremely convenient for post-mortem analysis
where flag combinations and states seem impossible. A new ABORT_NOW()
macro has also been added to make the code immediately segfault where
called.
The HTTP response code has been moved to a specific function
called "process_response" and the SV_STHEADERS state has been
removed and replaced with the flag AN_RTR_HTTP_HDR.
For the first time, HTTP and TCP are not merged anymore. All request
processing has moved to process_request while the TCP processing of
the frontend remains in process_cli. The code is a lot cleaner,
simpler, smaller (1%) and slightly faster (1% too).
Right now, the HTTP state machine cannot easily command the TCP
state machine, but it does not cause that many difficulties.
The response processing has not yet been extracted, and the unix-stream
state machines have to be broken down that way too.
The CL_STDATA, CL_STSHUTR and CL_STSHUTW states still exist and are
exactly the sames. They will have to be all merged into CL_STDATA
once the work has stabilized. It is also possible that this single
state will disappear in favor of just buffer flags.
The SV_STANALYZE state was installed on the server side but was really
meant to be processed with the rest of the request on the client side.
It suffered from several issues, mostly related to the way timeouts were
handled while waiting for data.
All known issues related to timeouts during a request - and specifically
a request involving body processing - have been raised and fixed. At this
point, the code is a bit dirty but works fine, so next steps might be
cleanups with an ability to come back to the current state in case of
trouble.
This is a first attempt at separating data processing from the
TCP state machine. Those two states have been replaced with flags
in the session indicating what needs to be analyzed. The corresponding
code is still called before and in lieu of TCP states.
Next change should get rid of the specific SV_STANALYZE which is in
fact a client state.
Then next change should consist in making it possible to analyze
TCP contents while being in CL_STDATA (or CL_STSHUT*).
A new buffer flag BF_MAY_FORWARD has been added so that the client
FSM can check whether it is allowed to forward the response to the
client. The client FSM does not have to monitor the server state
anymore.
A new buffer flag BF_MAY_CONNECT has been added so that the server
FSM can check whether it is allowed to establish a connection or
not. That way, the client FSM only has to move this flag and the
server side does not need to monitor client state anymore.
In order to make pool usage more convenient, let pool_free2()
support NULL pointers by doing nothing, just like the standard
free(3) call does.
The various call places have been updated to remove the now
useless checks.
Because I needed it in my situation - here's a quick patch to
allow changing of the "x-forwarded-for" header by using a suboption to
"option forwardfor".
Suboption "header XYZ" will set the header from "x-forwarded-for" to "XYZ".
Default is still "x-forwarded-for" if the header value isn't defined.
Also the suboption 'except a.b.c.d/z' still works on the same line.
So it's now: option forwardfor [except a.b.c.d[/z]] [header XYZ]
When an ACL is referenced at a wrong place (eg: response during request, layer7
during layer4), try to indicate precisely the name and requirements of this ACL.
Only the first faulty ACL is returned. A small change consisting in iterating
that way may improve reports :
cap = ACL_USE_any_unexpected
while ((acl=cond_find_require(cond, cap))) {
warning()
cap &= ~acl->requires;
}
This will report the first ACL of each unsupported type. But doing so will
mangle the error reporting a lot, so we need to rework error reports first.
All currently known ACL verbs have been assigned a type which makes
it possible to detect inconsistencies, such as response values used
in request rules.
ACL now hold information on the availability of the data they rely
on. They can indicate which parts of the requests/responses they
require, and the rules parser may now report inconsistencies.
As an example, switching rules are now checked for response-specific
ACLs, though those are not still set. A warning is reported in case
of mismatch. ACLs keyword restrictions will now have to be specifically
set wherever a better control is expected.
The line number where an ACL condition is declared has been added to
the conditions in order to be able to report the faulty line number
during post-loading checks.
For protocol analysis, it's not always convenient to have to run through
a fetch then a match against dummy values. It's easier to let the fetch()
function set the result itself. This obviously works only for boolean
values.
The INTBITS macro was found to be already defined on some platforms,
and to equal 32 (while INTBITS was 5 here). Due to pure luck, there
was no declaration conflict, but it's nonetheless a problem to fix.
Looking at the code showed that this macro was only used for left
shifts and nothing else anymore. So the replacement is obvious. The
new macro, BITS_PER_INT is more obviously correct.
It should be stated as a rule that a C file should never
include types/xxx.h when proto/xxx.h exists, as it gives
less exposure to declaration conflicts (one of which was
caught and fixed here) and it complicates the file headers
for nothing.
Only types/global.h, types/capture.h and types/polling.h
have been found to be valid includes from C files.
This new function supports one major and one minor and makes an int of them.
It is very convenient to compare versions (eg: SSL) just as if they were plain
integers, as the comparison functions will still be based on integers.
Some people need to inspect contents of TCP requests before
deciding to forward a connection or not. A future extension
of this demand might consist in selecting a server farm
depending on the protocol detected in the request.
For this reason, a new state CL_STINSPECT has been added on
the client side. It is immediately entered upon accept() if
the statement "tcp-request inspect-delay <xxx>" is found in
the frontend configuration. Haproxy will then wait up to
this amount of time trying to find a matching ACL, and will
either accept or reject the connection depending on the
"tcp-request content <action> {if|unless}" rules, where
<action> is either "accept" or "reject".
Note that it only waits that long if no definitive verdict
can be found earlier. That generally implies calling a fetch()
function which does not have enough information to decode
some contents, or a match() function which only finds the
beginning of what it's looking for.
It is only at the ACL level that partial data may be processed
as such, because we need to distinguish between MISS and FAIL
*before* applying the term negation.
Thus it is enough to add "| ACL_PARTIAL" to the last argument
when calling acl_exec_cond() to indicate that we expect
ACL_PAT_MISS to be returned if some data is missing (for
fetch() or match()). This is the only case we may return
this value. For this reason, the ACL check in process_cli()
has become a lot simpler.
A new ACL "req_len" of type "int" has been added. Right now
it is already possible to drop requests which talk too early
(eg: for SMTP) or which don't talk at all (eg: HTTP/SSL).
Also, the acl fetch() functions have been extended in order
to permit reporting of missing data in case of fetch failure,
using the ACL_TEST_F_MAY_CHANGE flag.
The default behaviour is unchanged, and if no rule matches,
the request is accepted.
As a side effect, all layer 7 fetching functions have been
cleaned up so that they now check for the validity of the
layer 7 pointer before dereferencing it.
Any module which needs configuration keywords may now dynamically
register a keyword in a given section, and associate it with a
configuration parsing function using cfg_register_keywords() from
a constructor function. This makes the configuration parser more
modular because it is not required anymore to touch cfg_parse.c.
Example :
static int parse_global_blah(char **args, int section_type, struct proxy *curpx,
struct proxy *defpx, char *err, int errlen)
{
printf("parsing blah in global section\n");
return 0;
}
static int parse_listen_blah(char **args, int section_type, struct proxy *curpx,
struct proxy *defpx, char *err, int errlen)
{
printf("parsing blah in listen section\n");
if (*args[1]) {
snprintf(err, errlen, "missing arg for listen_blah!!!");
return -1;
}
return 0;
}
static struct cfg_kw_list cfg_kws = {{ },{
{ CFG_GLOBAL, "blah", parse_global_blah },
{ CFG_LISTEN, "blah", parse_listen_blah },
{ 0, NULL, NULL },
}};
__attribute__((constructor))
static void __module_init(void)
{
cfg_register_keywords(&cfg_kws);
}
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.
This new time value will be used to compute timeouts and wait queue
positions. The operation is made once for all when time is retrieved.
A future improvement might consist in having it in ticks of 1/1024
second and to convert all timeouts into ticks.
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.
The first implementation of the monotonic clock did not verify
forward jumps. The consequence is that a fast changing time may
expire a lot of tasks. While it does seem minor, in fact it is
problematic because most machines which boot with a wrong date
are in the past and suddenly see their time jump by several
years in the future.
The solution is to check if we spent more apparent time in
a poller than allowed (with a margin applied). The margin
is currently set to 1000 ms. It should be large enough for
any poll() to complete.
Tests with randomly jumping clock show that the result is quite
accurate (error less than 1 second at every change of more than
one second).
If the system date is set backwards while haproxy is running,
some scheduled events are delayed by the amount of time the
clock went backwards. This is particularly problematic on
systems where the date is set at boot, because it seldom
happens that health-checks do not get sent for a few hours.
Before switching to use clock_gettime() on systems which
provide it, we can at least ensure that the clock is not
going backwards and maintain two clocks : the "date" which
represents what the user wants to see (mostly for logs),
and an internal date stored in "now", used for scheduled
events.
The dequeuing logic was completely wrong. First, a task was assigned
to all servers to process the queue, but this task was never scheduled
and was only woken up on session free. Second, there was no reservation
of server entries when a task was assigned a server. This means that
as long as the task was not connected to the server, its presence was
not accounted for. This was causing trouble when detecting whether or
not a server had reached maxconn. Third, during a redispatch, a session
could lose its place at the server's and get blocked because another
session at the same moment would have stolen the entry. Fourth, the
redispatch option did not work when maxqueue was reached for a server,
and it was not possible to do so without indefinitely hanging a session.
The root cause of all those problems was the lack of pre-reservation of
connections at the server's, and the lack of tracking of servers during
a redispatch. Everything relied on combinations of flags which could
appear similarly in quite distinct situations.
This patch is a major rework but there was no other solution, as the
internal logic was deeply flawed. The resulting code is cleaner, more
understandable, uses less magics and is overall more robust.
As an added bonus, "option redispatch" now works when maxqueue has
been reached on a server.
When a server terminates a connection, the next session in its
own queue was immediately processed. Because of this, if all
server queues are always filled, then no new anonymous request
will be processed. Consider oldest request between global and
server queues to choose from which to pick the request.
An improvement over this will consist in adding a configurable
offset when comparing expiration dates, so that cookie-less
requests can get either less or more priority.
The new TRACE macro is used almost like fprintf, except that a session
has to be passed instead of the file descriptor. It displays infos about
where it is called, session ptr and id, etc...
A new "redirect" keyword adds the ability to send an HTTP 301/302/303
redirection to either an absolute location or to a prefix followed by
the original URI. The redirection is conditionned by ACL rules, so it
becomes very easy to move parts of a site to another site using this.
This work was almost entirely done at Exceliance by Emeric Brun.
A test-case has been added in the tests/ directory.
- free oldpids
- call free(exp->preg), not only regfree(exp->preg): req_exp, rsp_exp
- build a list of unique uri_auths and eventually free it
- prune_acl_cond/free for switching_rules
- add a callback pointer to free ptr from acl_pattern (used for regexs) and execute it
==1180== malloc/free: in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==1180== malloc/free: 5,599 allocs, 5,599 frees, 4,220,556 bytes allocated.
==1180== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible.
New functions implemented:
- deinit_pollers: called at the end of deinit())
- prune_acl: called via list_for_each_entry_safe
Add missing pool_destroy2 calls:
- p->hdr_idx_pool
- pool2_tree64
Implement all task stopping:
- health-check: needs new "struct task" in the struct server
- queue processing: queue_mgt
- appsess_refresh: appsession_refresh
before (idle system):
==6079== LEAK SUMMARY:
==6079== definitely lost: 1,112 bytes in 75 blocks.
==6079== indirectly lost: 53,356 bytes in 2,090 blocks.
==6079== possibly lost: 52 bytes in 1 blocks.
==6079== still reachable: 150,996 bytes in 504 blocks.
==6079== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
after (idle system):
==6945== LEAK SUMMARY:
==6945== definitely lost: 7,644 bytes in 137 blocks.
==6945== indirectly lost: 9,913 bytes in 587 blocks.
==6945== possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==6945== still reachable: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==6945== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
before (running system for ~2m):
==9343== LEAK SUMMARY:
==9343== definitely lost: 1,112 bytes in 75 blocks.
==9343== indirectly lost: 54,199 bytes in 2,122 blocks.
==9343== possibly lost: 52 bytes in 1 blocks.
==9343== still reachable: 151,128 bytes in 509 blocks.
==9343== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
after (running system for ~2m):
==11616== LEAK SUMMARY:
==11616== definitely lost: 7,644 bytes in 137 blocks.
==11616== indirectly lost: 9,981 bytes in 591 blocks.
==11616== possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==11616== still reachable: 4 bytes in 1 blocks.
==11616== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
Still not perfect but significant improvement.
Add the ability to detect streaming buffers, and set a
flag indicating it. It will later serve us in order to
dynamically resize them, and to prioritize file descriptors
during polls.
This patch allows to specify a domain used when inserting a cookie
providing a session stickiness. Usefull for example with wildcard domains.
The patch adds one new variable to the struct proxy: cookiedomain.
When set the domain is appended to a Set-Cookie header.
Domain name is validated using the new invalid_domainchar() function.
It is basically invalid_char() limited to [A-Za-z0-9_.-]. Yes, the test
is too trivial and does not cover all wrong situations, but the main
purpose is to detect most common mistakes, not intentional abuses.
The underscore ("_") character is not RFC-valid but as it is
often (mis)used so I decided to allow it.
This patch adds two optional arguments "len" and "depth" to
"balance uri". They are used to limit the length in characters
of the analysis, as well as the number of directory components
it applies to.
For Fedora 9 gcc 4.3 will be shipping as a feature, and right now haproxy does
not compile with gcc 4.3.
It appears that there is a reordering of headers or something along those lines,
This is the patch that gets haproxy to compile with gcc 4.3. I'm not sure if
this is the correct approach you would want to use, so please correct me.
If this works for you, I'll go ahead and put this patch in the src rpm until a
release of haproxy which compiles with gcc 4.3 is released.
This patch extends the "url_param" load balancing method by introducing
the "check_post" option. Using this option enables analysis of the beginning
of POST requests to search for the specified URL parameter.
The patch also fixes a few minor typos in comments that were discovered
during code review.
Due to the way the stats socket work, it was not possible to
maintain the information related to the command entered, so
after filling a whole buffer, the request was lost and it was
considered that there was nothing to write anymore.
The major reason was that some flags were passed directly
during the first call to stats_dump_raw() instead of being
stored persistently in the session.
To definitely fix this problem, flags were added to the stats
member of the session structure.
A second problem appeared. When the stats were produced, a first
call to client_retnclose() was performed, then one or multiple
subsequent calls to buffer_write_chunks() were done. But once the
stats buffer was full and a reschedule operated, the buffer was
flushed, the write flag cleared from the buffer and nothing was
done to re-arm it.
For this reason, a check was added in the proto_uxst_stats()
function in order to re-call the client FSM when data were added
by stats_dump_raw(). Finally, the whole unix stats dump FSM was
rewritten to avoid all the magics it depended on. It is now
simpler and looks more like the HTTP one.
The new "leastconn" LB algorithm selects the server which has the
least established or pending connections. The weights are considered,
so that a server with a weight of 20 will get twice as many connections
as the server with a weight of 10.
The algorithm respects the minconn/maxconn settings, as well as the
slowstart since it is a dynamic algorithm. It also correctly supports
backup servers (one and all).
It is generally suited for protocols with long sessions (such as remote
terminals and databases), as it will ensure that upon restart, a server
with no connection will take all new ones until its load is balanced
with others.
A test configuration has been added in order to ease regression testing.
Matt Farnsworth reported a memory leak in str2sun() in case a too large
socket path is passed. The bug is very minor because it only happens
once during config parsing, but has to be fixed nevertheless. The patch
Matt provided could even be improved by completely removing the useless
strdup() in this function.
Currently there is a ~16KB limit for a data size passed via unix socket.
It is caused by a trivial bug ttat is going to fixed soon, however
in most cases there is no need to dump a full stats.
This patch makes possible to select a scope of dumped data by extending
current "show stat" to "show stat [<iid> <type> <sid>]":
- iid is a proxy id, -1 to dump all proxies
- type selects type of dumpable objects: 1 for frontend, 2 for backend, 4 for
server, -1 for all types. Values can be ORed, for example:
1+2=3 -> frontend+backend.
1+2+4=7 -> frontend+backend+server.
- sid is a service id, -1 to dump everything from the selected proxy.
To do this I implemented a new session flag (SN_STAT_BOUND), added three
variables in data_ctx.stats (iid, type, sid), modified dumpstats.c and
completely revorked the process_uxst_stats: now it waits for a "\n"
terminated string, splits args and uses them. BTW: It should be quite easy
to add new commands, for example to enable/disable servers, the only problem
I can see is a not very lucky config name (*stats* socket). :|
During the work I also fixed two bug:
- s->flags were not initialized for proto_uxst
- missing comma if throttling not enabled (caused by a stupid change in
"Implement persistent id for proxies and servers")
Other changes:
- No more magic type valuse, use STATS_TYPE_FE/STATS_TYPE_BE/STATS_TYPE_SV
- Don't memset full s->data_ctx (it was clearing s->data_ctx.stats.{iid/type/sid},
instead initialize stats.sv & stats.sv_st (stats.px and stats.px_st were already
initialized)
With all that changes it was extremely easy to write a short perl plugin
for a perl-enabled net-snmp (also included in this patch).
29385 is my PEN (Private Enterprise Number) and I'm willing to donate
the SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.29385.106.* OIDs for HAProxy if there
is nothing assigned already.
When haproxy decides that session needs to be redispatched it chose a server,
but there is no guarantee for it to be a different one. So, it often
happens that selected server is exactly the same that it was previously, so
a client ends up with a 503 error anyway, especially when one sever has
much bigger weight than others.
Changes from the previous version:
- drop stupid and unnecessary SN_DIRECT changes
- assign_server(): use srvtoavoid to keep the old server and clear s->srv
so SRV_STATUS_NOSRV guarantees that t->srv == NULL (again)
and get_server_rr_with_conns has chances to work (previously
we were passing a NULL here)
- srv_redispatch_connect(): remove t->srv->cum_sess and t->srv->failed_conns
incrementing as t->srv was guaranteed to be NULL
- add avoididx to get_server_rr_with_conns. I hope I correctly understand this code.
- fix http_flush_cookie_flags() and move it to assign_server_and_queue()
directly. The code here was supposed to set CK_DOWN and clear CK_VALID,
but: (TX_CK_VALID | TX_CK_DOWN) == TX_CK_VALID == TX_CK_MASK so:
if ((txn->flags & TX_CK_MASK) == TX_CK_VALID)
txn->flags ^= (TX_CK_VALID | TX_CK_DOWN);
was really a:
if ((txn->flags & TX_CK_MASK) == TX_CK_VALID)
txn->flags &= TX_CK_VALID
Now haproxy logs "--DI" after redispatching connection.
- defer srv->redispatches++ and s->be->redispatches++ so there
are called only if a conenction was redispatched, not only
supposed to.
- don't increment lbconn if redispatcher selected the same sarver
- don't count unsuccessfully redispatched connections as redispatched
connections
- don't count redispatched connections as errors, so:
- the number of connections effectively served by a server is:
srv->cum_sess - srv->failed_conns - srv->retries - srv->redispatches
and
SUM(servers->failed_conns) == be->failed_conns
- requires the "Don't increment server connections too much + fix retries" patch
- needs little more testing and probably some discussion so reverting to the RFC state
Tests #1:
retries 4
redispatch
i) 1 server(s): b (wght=1, down)
b) sessions=5, lbtot=1, err_conn=1, retr=4, redis=0
-> request failed
ii) server(s): b (wght=1, down), u (wght=1, down)
b) sessions=4, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=3, redis=1
u) sessions=1, lbtot=1, err_conn=1, retr=0, redis=0
-> request FAILED
iii) 2 server(s): b (wght=1, down), u (wght=1, up)
b) sessions=4, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=3, redis=1
u) sessions=1, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=0, redis=0
-> request OK
iv) 2 server(s): b (wght=100, down), u (wght=1, up)
b) sessions=4, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=3, redis=1
u) sessions=1, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=0, redis=0
-> request OK
v) 1 server(s): b (down for first 4 SYNS)
b) sessions=5, lbtot=1, err_conn=0, retr=4, redis=0
-> request OK
Tests #2:
retries 4
i) 1 server(s): b (down)
b) sessions=5, lbtot=1, err_conn=1, retr=4, redis=0
-> request FAILED
This patch implements ability to set the current state of one server
by tracking another one. It:
- adds two variables: *tracknext, *tracked to struct server
- implements findserver(), similar to findproxy()
- adds "track" keyword accepting both "proxy/server" and "server" (assuming current proxy)
- verifies if both checks and tracking is not enabled at the same time
- changes set_server_down() to notify tracking server
- creates set_server_up(), set_server_disabled(), set_server_enabled() by
moving the code from process_chk() and adding notifications
- changes stats to show a name of tracked server instead of Chk/Dwn/Dwntime(html)
or by adding new variable (csv)
Changes from the previuos version:
- it is possibile to track independently of the declaration order
- one extra comma bug is fixed
- new condition to check if there is no disable-on-404 inconsistency
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.
State and offsets within http_msg were incorrectly set to signed int.
Turning them into unsigned slightly improved performance while reducing
code size.
Now when a server has "redir <prefix>" on its config line, any HEAD or GET
request addressing it will lead to a 302 with Location set to "<prefix>"
immediately followed by the relative URI of the incoming request. This makes
it very easy to send redirect to browsers to check remote static servers, as
well as to provide redirection for remote sites when the local one is down.
The servers now support the "redir" keyword, making it possible to
return a 302 with the specified prefix in front of the request instead
of connecting to them. This is generally useful for multi-site load
balancing but may also serve in order to achieve very high traffic
rate.
The keyword has only been added to the config parser and to structures,
it's not used yet.
This patch adds two new variables: fastinter and downinter.
When server state is:
- non-transitionally UP -> inter (no change)
- transitionally UP (going down), unchecked or transitionally DOWN (going up) -> fastinter
- down -> downinter
It allows to set something like:
server sr6 127.0.51.61:80 cookie s6 check inter 10000 downinter 20000 fastinter 500 fall 3 weight 40
In the above example haproxy uses 10000ms between checks but as soon as
one check fails fastinter (500ms) is used. If server is down
downinter (20000) is used or fastinter (500ms) if one check pass.
Fastinter is also used when haproxy starts.
New "timeout.check" variable was added, if set haproxy uses it as an additional
read timeout, but only after a connection has been already established. I was
thinking about using "timeout.server" here but most people set this
with an addition reserve but still want checks to kick out laggy servers.
Please also note that in most cases check request is much simpler
and faster to handle than normal requests so this timeout should be smaller.
I also changed the timeout used for check connections establishing.
Changes from the previous version:
- use tv_isset() to check if the timeout is set,
- use min("timeout connect", "inter") but only if "timeout check" is set
as this min alone may be to short for full (connect + read) check,
- debug code (fprintf) commented/removed
- documentation
Compile tested only (sorry!) as I'm currently traveling but changes
are rather small and trivial.
Due to the way Linux delivers EPOLLIN and EPOLLHUP, a closed connection
received after some server data sometimes results in truncated responses
if the client disconnects before server starts to respond. The reason
is that the EPOLLHUP flag is processed as an indication of end of
transfer while some data may remain in the system's socket buffers.
This problem could only be triggered with sepoll, although nothing should
prevent it from happening with normal epoll. In fact, the work factoring
performed by sepoll increases the risk that this bug appears.
The fix consists in making FD_POLL_HUP and FD_POLL_ERR sticky and that
they are only checked if FD_POLL_IN is not set, meaning that we have
read all pending data.
That way, the problem is definitely fixed and sepoll still remains about
17% faster than epoll since it can take into account all information
returned by the kernel.
The source address selection for health checks did not consider
the new transparent proxy method. Rely on the same unified function
as the other connect() calls.
This patch also fixes a bug by which the proxy's source address was
ignored if cttproxy was used.
Balabit's TPROXY version 4 which replaces CTTPROXY provides a similar
API to the previous proxy, but relies on IP_FREEBIND instead of
IP_TRANSPARENT. Let's add it.
Using some Linux kernel patches, it is possible to redirect non-local
traffic to local sockets when IP forwarding is enabled. In order to
enable this option, we introduce the "transparent" option keyword on
the "bind" command line. It will make the socket reachable by remote
sources even if the destination address does not belong to the machine.
Several users have complained that when haproxy gets a connection
failure due to an active reject from a server, it immediately
retries, often leading to the same situation being repeated until
the retry counter reaches zero.
Now if a connection error shows up, a turn-around state of 1 second
is applied before retrying. This is performed by faking a connection
timeout in order not to touch much code. However, a cleaner method
would involve an extra state.
This patch extends a little previously added functionality to also
count retries and redispatches for servers. Now it is possible to know
which server causes redispatches as it is not always the same that takes
most retries.
While working with the code I found that redistribute_pending() does not increment
srv->redispatches && be->redispatches. I don't know how to test it but
I think the fix is correct. If not I can withdraw it.
I also extended logs to show how many retries were done and if redispatching
was necessary ('+'). I'm using an additional session flag SN_REDISP to match
redispatched connections. I had to rearrange all defines in session.h to make
more room for it.
The documentation about logs was also fixed a little (sorry, english only),
as current version uses totally different format. BTW: examples are still
outdated, maybe next time...
Finally, I changed %d -> %u for retries/redispatches as those variables
are declared as unsigned.
In order to offer DoS protection, it may be required to lower the maximum
accepted time to receive a complete HTTP request without affecting the client
timeout. This helps protecting against established connections on which
nothing is sent. The client timeout cannot offer a good protection against
this abuse because it is an inactivity timeout, which means that if the
attacker sends one character every now and then, the timeout will not
trigger. With the HTTP request timeout, no matter what speed the client
types, the request will be aborted if it does not complete in time.
This new parameter makes it possible to override the default
number of consecutive incoming connections which can be
accepted on a socket. By default it is not limited on single
process mode, and limited to 8 in multi-process mode.
Add the "backlog" parameter to frontends, to give hints to
the system about the approximate listen backlog desired size.
In order to protect against SYN flood attacks, one solution is
to increase the system's SYN backlog size. Depending on the
system, sometimes it is just tunable via a system parameter,
sometimes it is not adjustable at all, and sometimes the system
relies on hints given by the application at the time of the
listen() syscall. By default, HAProxy passes the frontend's
maxconn value to the listen() syscall. On systems which can
make use of this value, it can sometimes be useful to be able
to specify a different value, hence this backlog parameter.
It is sometimes required to know some informations such as the
process uptime when consulting statistics. This patch adds the
"show info" command to query those informations on the UNIX
socket.
This patch adds a possibility to invert most of available options by
introducing the "no" keyword, available as an additional prefix.
If it is found arguments are shifted left and an additional flag (inv)
is set.
It allows to use all options from a current defaults section, except
the selected ones, for example:
-- cut here --
defaults
contimeout 4200
clitimeout 50000
srvtimeout 40000
option contstats
listen stats 1.2.3.4:80
no option contstats
-- cut here --
Currenly inversion works only with the "option" keyword.
The patch also moves last_checks calculation at the end of the readcfgfile()
function and changes "PR_O_FORCE_CLO | PR_O_HTTP_CLOSE" into "PR_O_FORCE_CLO"
in cfg_opts so it is possible to invert forceclose without breaking httpclose
(and vice versa) and to invert tcpsplice in one proxy but to keep a proper
last_checks value when tcpsplice is used in another proxy. Now, the code
checks for PR_O_FORCE_CLO everywhere it checks for PR_O_HTTP_CLOSE.
I also decided to depreciate "redisp" and "redispatch" keywords as it is IMHO
better to use "option redispatch" which can be inverted.
Some useful documentation were added and at the same time I sorted
(alfabetically) all valid options both in the code and the documentation.
The code in haproxy-1.3.13.1 only supports syslogging to an internet
address. The attached patch:
- Adds support for syslogging to a UNIX domain socket (e.g., /dev/log).
If the address field begins with '/' (absolute file path), then
AF_UNIX is used to construct the socket. Otherwise, AF_INET is used.
- Achieves clean single-source build on both Mac OS X and Linux
(sockaddr_in.sin_len and sockaddr_un.sun_len field aren't always present).
For handling sendto() failures in send_log(), it appears that the existing
code is fine (no need to close/recreate socket) for both UDP and UNIX-domain
syslog server. So I left things alone (did not close/recreate socket).
Closing/recreating socket after each failure would also work, but would lead
to increased amount of unnecessary socket creation/destruction if syslog is
temporarily unavailable for some reason (especially for verbose loggers).
Please consider this patch for inclusion into the upstream haproxy codebase.
One user reported that an indicator was missing in the statistics:
the number of times each server was selected by load balancing. It
is in fact the total number of sessions assigned to a server by the
load balancing algorithm. It should directly reflect the weight for
"fair" algorithms such as round-robin, since it will not account for
persistant connections.
It should help a lot tuning each server's weight depending on the
load it receives.
A new "timeout" keyword replaces old "{con|cli|srv}timeout", and
provides the ability to independantly set the following timeouts :
- client
- tarpit
- queue
- connect
- server
- appsession
Additionally, the "clitimeout", "contimeout" and "srvtimeout" values
are supported but deprecated. No warning is emitted yet when they are
used since the option is very new.
Other timeouts should follow soon now.
Now the connect timeout, tarpit timeout and queue timeout are
distinct. In order to retain compatibility with older versions,
if either queue or tarpit is left unset both in the proxy and
in the default proxy, then it is inherited from the connect
timeout as before.
This new function accepts inputs in various default units, from
the microsecond to the day. It detects suffixes after numbers
and performs the appropriate conversions between the user's unit
and the program's unit, considering a unit-less number in the
default unit.
In order to avoid issues in the future, we want to restrict
the set of allowed characters for identifiers. Starting from
now, only A-Z, a-z, 0-9, '-', '_', '.' and ':' will be allowed
for a proxy, a server or an ACL name.
A test file has been added to check the restriction.
Now we can compute the max place depending on the number of servers,
maximum weight and weight scale. The formula has been stored as a
comment so that it's easy to choose between smooth weight ramp up
and high number of servers. The default scale has been set to 16,
which permits 4000 servers with a granularity of 6% in the worst
case (weight=1).
Under certain circumstances, it is very useful to be able to fail some
monitor requests. One specific case is when the number of servers in
the backend falls below a certain level. The new "monitor fail" construct
followed by either "if"/"unless" <condition> makes it possible to specify
ACL-based conditions which will make the monitor return 503 instead of
200. Any number of conditions can be passed. Another use may be to limit
the requests to local networks only.
AIX does not know about MSG_DONTWAIT. Fortunately, nearly all sockets
are already set to O_NONBLOCK, so it's not even required to change the
code. It was only necessary to add this fcntl to the log socket which
lacked it. The MSG_DONTWAIT value has been defined to zero when unset
in order to make the code cleaner and more portable.
Also, on AIX, "hz" is defined, which causes a problem with one function
parameter in time.c. It's enough to rename the parameter there. Last,
fix a missing #include <string.h> in proxy.c.
The new 'slowstart' parameter for a server accepts a value in
milliseconds which indicates after how long a server which has
just come back up will run at full speed. The speed grows
linearly from 0 to 100% during this time. The limitation applies
to two parameters :
- maxconn: the number of connections accepted by the server
will grow from 1 to 100% of the usual dynamic limit defined
by (minconn,maxconn,fullconn).
- weight: when the backend uses a dynamic weighted algorithm,
the weight grows linearly from 1 to 100%. In this case, the
weight is updated at every health-check. For this reason, it
is important that the 'inter' parameter is smaller than the
'slowstart', in order to maximize the number of steps.
The slowstart never applies when haproxy starts, otherwise it
would cause trouble to running servers. It only applies when
a server has been previously seen as failed.
When an HTTP server returns "404 not found", it indicates that at least
part of it is still running. For this reason, it can be convenient for
application administrators to be able to consider code 404 as valid,
but for a server which does not want to participate to load balancing
anymore. This is useful to seamlessly exclude a server from a farm
without acting on the load balancer. For instance, let's consider that
haproxy checks for the "/alive" file. To enable load balancing on a
server, the admin would simply do :
# touch /var/www/alive
And to disable the server, he would simply do :
# rm /var/www/alive
Another immediate gain from doing this is that it is now possible to
send NOTICE messages instead of ALERT messages when a server is first
disable, then goes down. This provides a graceful shutdown method.
To enable this behaviour, specify "http-check disable-on-404" in the
backend.
Hello,
You will find attached an updated release of previously submitted patch.
It polish some part and extend ACL engine to match IP and PORT parsed in
HTTP request. (and take care of comments made by Willy ! ;))
Best regards,
Alexandre
The number of possible options for a proxy has already reached
32, which is the current limit due to the fact that they are
each represented as a bit in a 32-bit word.
It's possible to move the load balancing algorithms to another
place. It will also save some space for future algorithms.
This round robin algorithm was written from trees, so that we
do not have to recompute any table when changing server weights.
This solution allows on-the-fly weight adjustments with immediate
effect on the load distribution.
There is still a limitation due to 32-bit computations, to about
2000 servers at full scale (weight 255), or more servers with
lower weights. Basically, sum(srv.weight)*4096 must be below 2^31.
Test configurations and an example program used to develop the
tree will be added next.
Many changes have been brought to the weights computations and
variables in order to accomodate for the possiblity of a server to
be running but disabled from load balancing due to a null weight.
Under some circumstances, it will be useful to be able to have
a server's effective weight bigger than the user weight, and this
is particularly true for dynamic weight-based algorithms. In order
to support this, we add a "wdiv" member to the lbprm structure
which will always be used to divide the weights before reporting
them.
Since the introduction of server weights, all load balancing algorithms
relied on a pre-computed map. Incidently, quite a bunch of map-specific
parameters were used at random places in order to get the number of
servers or their total weight. It was not architecturally acceptable
that optimizations for the map computation had impact on external parts.
For instance, during this cleanup it was found that a backend weight was
seen as 1 when only the first backup server is used, whatever its weight.
This cleanup consists in differentiating between LB-generic parameters,
such as total weights, number of servers, etc... and map-specific ones.
The struct proxy has been enhanced in order to make it easier to later
support other algorithms. The recount_servers() function now also
updates generic values such as total weights so that it's not needed
anymore to call recalc_server_map() when weights are needed. This
permitted to simplify some code which does not need to know about map
internals anymore.
By default, counters used for statistics calculation are incremented
only when a session finishes. It works quite well when serving small
objects, but with big ones (for example large images or archives) or
with A/V streaming, a graph generated from haproxy counters looks like
a hedgehog.
This patch implements a contstats (continous statistics) option.
When set counters get incremented continuously, during a whole session.
Recounting touches a hotpath directly so it is not enabled by default,
as it has small performance impact (~0.5%).
It is very convenient for SNMP monitoring to have unique process ID,
proxy ID and server ID. Those have been added to the CSV outputs.
The numbers start at 1. 0 is reserved. For servers, 0 means that the
reported name is not a server name but half a proxy (FRONTEND/BACKEND).
A remaining hidden "-" in the CSV output has been eliminated too.
Proxy listeners were very special and not very easy to manipulate.
A proto_tcp file has been created with all that is required to
manage TCPv4/TCPv6 as raw protocols, and provide generic listeners.
The code of start_proxies() and maintain_proxies() now looks less
like spaghetti. Also, event_accept will need a serious lifting in
order to use more of the information provided by the listener.
There was a missing state for listeners, when they are not listening
but still attached to the protocol. The LI_ASSIGNED state was added
for this purpose. This permitted to clean up the assignment/release
workflow quite a bit. Generic enable/enable_all/disable/disable_all
primitives were added, and a disable_all entry was added to the
struct protocol.
It's not easy to report useful information to help the user quickly
fix a configuration. This patch :
- removes the word "listener" in favor of "proxy" as it has been
used since the beginning ;
- ensures that the same function (hence the same words) will be
used to report capabilities of a proxy being declared and an
existing proxy ;
- avoid the term "conflicting capabilities" in favor of "overlapping
capabilities" which is more exact.
- just report that the same name is reused in case of warnings
This patch:
- adds proxy_mode_str() similar to proxy_type_str()
- adds a generic findproxy function used with default_backend/setbe/use_backed
- rewrite default_backend/senbe/use_backed to use introduced findproxy()
- relaxes duplicated proxy check
- changes capabilities displaying from "%X" to "%s" with a call to proxy_type_str()
Some applications do not have a strict persistence requirement, yet
it is still desirable for performance considerations, due to local
caches on the servers. For some reasons, there are some applications
which cannot rely on cookies, and for which the last resort is to use
a parameter passed in the URL.
The new 'url_param' balance method is there to solve this issue. It
accepts a parameter name which is looked up from the URL and which
is then hashed to select a server. If the parameter is not found,
then the round robin algorithm is used in order to provide a normal
load balancing across the servers for the first requests. It would
have been possible to use a source IP hash instead, but since such
applications are generally buried behind multiple levels of
reverse-proxies, it would not provide a good balance.
The doc has been updated, and two regression testing configurations
have been added.
A new function "backend_parse_balance" has been created in backend.c,
which is dedicated to the parsing of the "balance" keyword. It will
provide easier methods for adding new algorithms.
In preparation for newer balance algorithms, group the
sparse PR_O_BALANCE_* values into layer4 and layer7-based
algorithms. This will ease addition of newer algorithms.
Currently, there is a hidden line length limit in the haproxy, set
to 256-1 chars. With large acls (for example many hdr(host) matches)
it may be not enough and which is even worse, error message may
be totally confusing as everything above this limit is treated
as a next line:
echo -ne "frontend aqq 1.2.3.4:80\nmode http\nacl e hdr(host) -i X X X X X X X www.xx.example.com stats\n"|
sed s/X/www.some-host-name.example.com/g > ha.cfg && haproxy -c -f ./ha.cfg
[WARNING] 300/163906 (11342) : parsing [./ha.cfg:4] : 'stats' ignored because frontend 'aqq' has no backend capability.
Recently I hit simmilar problem and it took me a while to find why
requests for "stats" are not handled properly.
This patch:
- makes the limit configurable (LINESIZE)
- increases default line length limit from 256 to 2048
- increases MAX_LINE_ARGS from 40 to 64
- fixes hidden assignment in fgets()
- moves arg/end/args/line inside the loop, making code auditing easier
- adds a check that shows error if the limit is reached
- changes "*line++ = 0;" to "*line++ = '\0';" (cosmetics)
With this patch, when LINESIZE is defined to 256, above example produces:
[ALERT] 300/164724 (27364) : parsing [/tmp/ha.cfg:3]: line too long, limit: 255.
[ALERT] 300/164724 (27364) : Error reading configuration file : /tmp/ha.cfg
Building ev_kqueue on OpenBSD causes some warnings to occur,
because OpenBSD also uses LIST_* macros in sys/queue.h, included
from sys/event.h. Simply undefine those macros since we don't
need them.
This patch adds the "maxqueue" parameter to the server. This allows new
sessions to be immediately rebalanced when the server's queue is filled.
It's useful when session stickiness is just a performance boost (even a
huge one) but not a requirement.
This should only be used if session affinity isn't a hard functional
requirement but provides performance boost by keeping server-local
caches hot and compact).
Absence of 'maxqueue' option means unlimited queue. When queue gets filled
up to 'maxqueue' client session is moved from server-local queue to a global
one.
This is in fact the same as ultoa() except that it's possible to
pass the string to be returned in case the value is NULL. This is
useful to report limits in printf calls.
Current ultoa() function is limited to one use per expression or
function call. Sometimes this is limitating. Change this in favor
of an array of 10 return values and shorter macros U2A0..U2A9
which respectively call the function with the 10 different buffers.
localtime() was called with pointers to tv_sec, which is time_t on
some platforms and long on others. A problem was encountered on
Sparc64 under OpenBSD where tv_sec is long (64 bits) and time_t is
32 bits. Since this architecture is big-endian, it exhibited the
bug because localtime() always worked with the high part of the
value which is always zero. This problem was identified and debugged
by Thierry Fournier.
The correct solution is to pass the date by value and not by pointer,
through an intermediate function. The use of localtime_r() instead of
localtime() also made it possible to get rid of the first call to
localtime() since it does not need to allocate memory anymore.
The strl2ic() and strl2uic() primitives used to convert string to
integers could return 10 times the value read if they stopped on
non-digit because of a mis-placed loop exit.
Hello,
This patch implements new statistics for SLA calculation by adding new
field 'Dwntime' with total down time since restart (both HTTP/CSV) and
extending status field (HTTP) or inserting a new one (CSV) with time
showing how long each server/backend is in a current state. Additionaly,
down transations are also calculated and displayed for backends, so it is
possible to know how many times selected backend was down, generating "No
server is available to handle this request." error.
New information are presentetd in two different ways:
- for HTTP: a "human redable form", one of "100000d 23h", "23h 59m" or
"59m 59s"
- for CSV: seconds
I believe that seconds resolution is enough.
As there are more columns in the status page I decided to shrink some
names to make more space:
- Weight -> Wght
- Check -> Chk
- Down -> Dwn
Making described changes I also made some improvements and fixed some
small bugs:
- don't increment s->health above 's->rise + s->fall - 1'. Previously it
was incremented an then (re)set to 's->rise + s->fall - 1'.
- do not set server down if it is down already
- do not set server up if it is up already
- fix colspan in multiple places (mostly introduced by my previous patch)
- add missing "status" header to CSV
- fix order of retries/redispatches in server (CSV)
- s/Tthen/Then/
- s/server/backend/ in DATA_ST_PX_BE (dumpstats.c)
Changes from previous version:
- deal with negative time intervales
- don't relay on s->state (SRV_RUNNING)
- little reworked human_time + compacted format (no spaces). If needed it
can be used in the future for other purposes by optionally making "cnt"
as an argument
- leave set_server_down mostly unchanged
- only little reworked "process_chk: 9"
- additional fields in CSV are appended to the rigth
- fix "SEC" macro
- named arguments (human_time, be_downtime, srv_downtime)
Hope it is OK. If there are only cosmetic changes needed please fill free
to correct it, however if there are some bigger changes required I would
like to discuss it first or at last to know what exactly was changed
especially since I already put this patch into my production server. :)
Thank you,
Best regards,
Krzysztof Oledzki
It is important to know how your installation performs. Haproxy masks
connection errors, which is extremely good for a client but it is bad for
an administrator (except people believing that "ignorance is a bless").
Attached patch adds retries and redispatches counters, so now haproxy:
1. For server:
- counts retried connections (masked or not)
2. For backends:
- counts retried connections (masked or not) that happened to
a slave server
- counts redispatched connections
- does not count successfully redispatched connections as backend errors.
Errors are increased only when client does not get a valid response,
in other words: with failed redispatch or when this function is not
enabled.
3. For statistics:
- display Retr (retries) and Redis (redispatches) as a "Warning"
information.
Removed old unused MODE_LOG and MODE_STATS, and replaced the "stats"
keyword in the global section. The new "stats" keyword in the global
section is used to create a UNIX socket on which the statistics will
be accessed. The client must issue a "show stat\n" command in order
to get a CSV-formated output similar to the output on the HTTP socket
in CSV mode.
A unix socket can now access the statistics. It currently only
recognizes the "show stat\n" command at the beginning of the
input, then returns the statistics in CSV format.
It is now possible to get CSV ouput from the statistics by
simply appending ";csv" to the HTTP request sent to get the
stats. The fields keep the same ordering as in the HTML page,
and a field "pxname" has been prepended at the beginning of
the line.
A new file, proto_uxst.c, implements support of PF_UNIX sockets
of type SOCK_STREAM. It relies on generic stream_sock_read/write
and uses its own accept primitive which also tries to be generic.
Right now it only implements an echo service in sight of a general
support for start dumping via unix socket. The echo code is more
of a proof of concept than useful code.
A new generic protocol mechanism has been added. It provides
an easy method to implement new protocols with different
listeners (eg: unix sockets).
The listeners are automatically started at the right moment
and enabled after the possible fork().
The stream_sock_* functions had to know about sessions just in
order to get the server's address for a connect() operation. This
is not desirable, particularly for non-IP protocols (eg: PF_UNIX).
Put a pointer to the peer's sockaddr_storage or sockaddr address
in the fdtab structure so that we never need to look further.
With this small change, the stream_sock.c file is now 100% protocol
independant.
For people who manage many haproxies, it is sometimes convenient
to be informed of their version. This patch adds this, with the
option to disable this report by specifying "stats hide-version".
Also, the feature may be permanently disabled by setting the
STATS_VERSION_STRING to "" (empty string), or the format can
simply be adjusted.
When one server in one backend has a very low check interval, it imposes
its value as the minimal interval, causing all other servers to start
their checks close to each other, thus partially voiding the benefits of
the spread checks.
The solution consists in ignoring intervals lower than a given value
(SRV_CHK_INTER_THRES = 1000 ms) when computing the minimal interval,
and then assigning them a start date relative to their own interval
and not the global one.
With this change, the checks distribution clearly looks better.
When one server appears at the same position in multiple backends, it
receives all the checks from all the backends exactly at the same time
because the health-checks are only spread within a backend but not
globally.
Attached patch implements per-server start delay in a different way.
Checks are now spread globally - not locally to one backend. It also makes
them start faster - IMHO there is no need to add a 'server->inter' when
calculating first execution. Calculation were moved from cfgparse.c to
checks.c. There is a new function start_checks() and now it is not called
when haproxy is started in MODE_CHECK.
With this patch it is also possible to set a global 'spread-checks'
parameter. It takes a percentage value (1..50, probably something near
5..10 is a good idea) so haproxy adds or removes that many percent to the
original interval after each check. My test shows that with 18 backends,
54 servers total and 10000ms/5% it takes about 45m to mix them completely.
I decided to use rand/srand pseudo-random number generator. I am aware it
is not recommend for a good randomness but a) we do not need a good random
generator here b) it is probably the most portable one.
The following patch will give the ability to tweak socket linger mode.
You can use this option with "option nolinger" inside fronted or backend
configuration declaration.
This will help in environments where lots of FIN_WAIT sockets are
encountered.
The version does not appear anymore in the Makefiles nor in
the include files. It was a nightmare to maintain. Now there
is a VERSION file which contains the major version, a VERDATE
file which contains the date for this version and a SUBVERS
file which may contain a sub-version.
A "make version" target has been added to all makefiles to
check the version. The GNU Makefile also has an update-version
target to update those files. This should never be used.
It is still possible to override those values by specifying
them in the equivalent make variables. By default, the GNU
makefile tries to detect a GIT repository and always uses the
version and date from the current repository. This can be
disabled by setting IGNOREGIT to a non-void value.
src/chtbl.c, src/hashpjw.c and src/list.c are distributed under
an obscure license. While Aleks and I believe that this license
is OK for haproxy, other people think it is not compatible with
the GPL.
Whether it is or not is not the problem. The fact that it rises
a doubt is sufficient for this problem to be addressed. Arnaud
Cornet rewrote the unclear parts with clean GPLv2 and LGPL code.
The hash algorithm has changed too and the code has been slightly
simplified in the process. A lot of care has been taken in order
to respect the original API as much as possible, including the
LGPL for the exportable parts.
The new code has not been thoroughly tested but it looks OK now.
The stats page now supports an option to hide servers which are DOWN
and to enable/disable automatic refresh. It is also possible to ask
for an immediate refresh.
Sometimes it may be desirable to automatically refresh the
stats page. Most browsers support the "Refresh:" header with
an interval in seconds. Specifying "stats refresh xxx" will
automatically add this header.
When a very large number of servers is configured (thousands),
shutting down many of them at once could lead to large number
of calls to recalc_server_map() which already takes some time.
This would result in an O(N^3) computation time, leading to
noticeable pauses on slow embedded CPUs on test platforms.
Instead, mark the map as dirty and recalc it only when needed.
- acl: smarter integer comparison support in ACLs
- acl: specify the direction during fetches
- acl: provide the argument length for fetch functions
- acl: provide a reference to the expr to fetch()
- acl: implement matching on header values
- acl: support maching on 'path' component
- acl: permit to return any header when no name specified
- errorfile: use a local file to feed error messages
- negation in ACL conds was not cleared between terms
- fix segfault at exit when using captures
- improve memory freeing upon exit
- acl: support '-i' to ignore case when matching
- str2net() must not change the const char *
- provide default ACLs
- acl: distinguish between request and response headers
- added the 'use_backend' keyword for full content-switching
- acl: added the TRUE and FALSE ACLs.
- shut warnings 'is*' macros from ctype.h on solaris
Those ACLs are sometimes useful for troubleshooting. Two ACL subjects
"always_true" and "always_false" have been added too. They return what
their subject says for every pattern. Also, acl_match_pst() has been
removed.
The new "use_backend" keyword permits full content switching by the
use of ACLs. Its usage is simple :
use_backend <backend_name> {if|unless} <acl_cond>
Implemented the "-i" option on ACLs to state that the matching
will have to be performed for all patterns ignoring case. The
usage is :
acl <aclname> <aclsubject> -i pattern1 ...
If a pattern must begin with "-", either it must not be the first one,
or the "--" option should be specified first.
hdr(x), hdr_reg(x), hdr_beg(x), hdr_end(x), hdr_sub(x), hdr_dir(x),
hdr_dom(x), hdr_cnt(x) and hdr_val(x) have been implemented. They
apply to any of the possibly multiple values of header <x>.
Right now, hdr_val() is limited to integer matching, but it should
reasonably be upgraded to match long long ints.
Some fetches such as 'line' or 'hdr' need to know the direction of
the test (request or response). A new 'dir' parameter is now
propagated from the caller to achieve this.
ACLs now support operators such as 'eq', 'le', 'lt', 'ge' and 'gt'
in order to give more flexibility to the language. Because of this
change, the 'dst_limit' keyword changed to 'dst_conn' and now requires
either a range or a test such as 'dst_conn lt 1000' which is more
understandable.
- do not re-arm read timeout in SHUTR state
- optimize I/O by detecting system starvation
- the epoll FD must not be shared between processes
- limit the number of events returned by *poll*
By default, epoll/kqueue used to return as many events as possible.
This could sometimes cause huge latencies (latencies of up to 400 ms
have been observed with many thousands of fds at once). Limiting the
number of events returned also reduces the latency by avoiding too
many blind processing. The value is set to 200 by default and can be
changed in the global section using the tune.maxpollevents parameter.
A second occurrence of read-timeout rearming was present in stream_sock.c.
To fix the problem, it was necessary to put the shutdown information in
the buffer (already planned).
- fixed ev_sepoll again by rewriting the state machine
- switched all timeouts to timevals instead of milliseconds
- improved memory management using mempools v2.
- several minor optimizations
When we're interrupted by another instance, it is very likely
that the other one will need some memory. Now we know how to
free what is not used, so let's do it.
Also only free non-null pointers. Previously, pool_destroy()
did implicitly check for this case which was incidentely
needed.
- keep the number of users of each pool
- call the garbage collector on out of memory conditions
- sort the pools by size for faster creation
- force the alignment size to 16 bytes instead of 4*sizeof(void *)
Also during this process, a bug was found in appsession_refresh().
It would not automatically requeue the task in the queue, so the
old sessions would not vanish.
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.
- several fixes in ev_sepoll
- fixed some expiration dates on some tasks
- fixed a bug in connection establishment detection due to speculative I/O
- fixed rare bug occuring on TCP with early close (reported by Andy Smith)
- implemented URI hashing algorithm (Guillaume Dallaire)
- implemented SMTP health checks (Peter van Dijk)
- replaced the rbtree with ul2tree from old scheduler project
- new framework for generic ACL support
- added the 'acl' and 'block' keywords to the config language
- added several ACL criteria and matches (IP, port, URI, ...)
- cleaned up and better modularization for some time functions
- fixed list macros
- fixed useless memory allocation in str2net()
- store the original destination address in the session
Peter van Dijk contributed this patch which implements the "smtpchk"
option, which is to SMTP what "httpchk" is to HTTP. By default, it sends
"HELO localhost" to the servers, and waits for the 250 message, but it
can also send a specific request.
The new 'block' keyword makes it possible to block a request based on
ACL test results. Block accepts two optional arguments : 'if' <cond>
and 'unless' <cond>.
The request will be blocked with a 403 response if the condition is validated
(if) or if it is not (unless). Do not rely on this one too much, as it's more
of a proof of concept helping in developing other matches.
