Quite a lot of people have been complaining about option contstats not
working correctly anymore since about 1.4. The reason was that one reason
for the significant performance boost between 1.3 and 1.4 was the ability
to forward data between a server and a client without waking up the stream
manager. And we couldn't afford to force sessions to constantly wake it
up given that most of the people interested in contstats are also those
interested in high performance transmission.
An idea was experimented with in the past, consisting in limiting the
amount of transmissible data before waking it up, but it was not usable
on slow connections (eg: FTP over modem lines, RDP, SSH) as stats would
be updated too rarely if at all, so that idea was dropped.
During a discussion today another idea came up : ensure that stats are
updated once in a while, since it's the only thing that matters. It
happens that we have the request channel's analyse_exp timeout that is
used to wake the stream up after a configured delay, and that by
definition this timeout is not used when there's no more analyser
(otherwise the stream would wake up and the stats would be updated).
Thus here the idea is to reuse this timeout when there's no analyser
and set it to now+5 seconds so that a stream wakes up at least once
every 5 seconds to update its stats. It should be short enough to
provide smooth traffic graphs and to allow to debug outputs of "show
sess" more easily without inflicting too much load even for very large
number of concurrent connections.
This patch is simple enough and safe enough to be backportable to 1.6
if there is some demand.
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