On the mailing list, seri0528@naver.com reported an issue when
using balance url_param or balance uri. The request would sometimes
stall forever.
Cyril Bonté managed to reproduce it with the configuration below :
listen test :80
mode http
balance url_param q
hash-type consistent
server s demo.1wt.eu:80
and found it appeared with this commit : 80a92c0 ("BUG/MEDIUM: http:
don't start to forward request data before the connect").
The bug is subtle but real. The problem is that the HTTP request
forwarding analyzer refrains from starting to parse the request
body when some LB algorithms might need the body contents, in order
to preserve the data pointer and avoid moving things around during
analysis in case a redispatch is later needed. And in order to detect
that the connection establishes, it watches the response channel's
CF_READ_ATTACHED flag.
The problem is that a request analyzer is not subscribed to a response
channel, so it will only see changes when woken for other (generally
correlated) reasons, such as the fact that part of the request could
be sent. And since the CF_READ_ATTACHED flag is cleared once leaving
process_session(), it is important not to miss it. It simply happens
that sometimes the server starts to respond in a sequence that validates
the connection in the middle of process_session(), that it is detected
after the analysers, and that the newly assigned CF_READ_ATTACHED is
not used to detect that the request analysers need to be called again,
then the flag is lost.
The CF_WAKE_WRITE flag doesn't work either because it's cleared upon
entry into process_session(), ie if we spend more than one call not
connecting.
Thus we need a new flag to tell the connection initiator that we are
specifically interested in being notified about connection establishment.
This new flag is CF_WAKE_CONNECT. It is set by the requester, and is
cleared once the connection succeeds, where CF_WAKE_ONCE is set instead,
causing the request analysers to be scanned again.
For future versions, some better options will have to be considered :
- let all analysers subscribe to both request and response events ;
- let analysers subscribe to stream interface events (reduces number
of useless calls)
- change CF_WAKE_WRITE's semantics to persist across calls to
process_session(), but that is different from validating a
connection establishment (eg: no data sent, or no data to send)
The bug was introduced in 1.5-dev23, no backport is needed.
644c101e2d