While this feature is not used by Redis, ae.c implements the ability for
a timer to call a finalizer callback when an timer event is deleted.
This feature was bugged since the start, and because it was never used
we never noticed a problem. However Anthony LaTorre was using the same
library in order to implement a different system: he found a bug that he
describes as follows, and which he fixed with the patch in this commit,
sent me by private email:
--- Anthony email ---
've found one bug in the current implementation of the timed events.
It's possible to lose track of a timed event if an event is added in
the finalizerProc of another event.
For example, suppose you start off with three timed events 1, 2, and
3. Then the linked list looks like:
3 -> 2 -> 1
Then, you run processTimeEvents and events 2 and 3 finish, so now the
list looks like:
-1 -> -1 -> 2
Now, on the next iteration of processTimeEvents it starts by deleting
the first event, and suppose this finalizerProc creates a new event,
so that the list looks like this:
4 -> -1 -> 2
On the next iteration of the while loop, when it gets to the second
event, the variable prev is still set to NULL, so that the head of the
event loop after the next event will be set to 2, i.e. after deleting
the next event the event loop will look like:
2
and the event with id 4 will be lost.
I've attached an example program to illustrate the issue. If you run
it you will see that it prints:
```
foo id = 0
spam!
```
But if you uncomment line 29 and run it again it won't print "spam!".
--- End of email ---
Test.c source code is as follows:
#include "ae.h"
#include <stdio.h>
aeEventLoop *el;
int foo(struct aeEventLoop *el, long long id, void *data)
{
printf("foo id = %lld\n", id);
return AE_NOMORE;
}
int spam(struct aeEventLoop *el, long long id, void *data)
{
printf("spam!\n");
return AE_NOMORE;
}
void bar(struct aeEventLoop *el, void *data)
{
aeCreateTimeEvent(el, 0, spam, NULL, NULL);
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
el = aeCreateEventLoop(100);
//aeCreateTimeEvent(el, 0, foo, NULL, NULL);
aeCreateTimeEvent(el, 0, foo, NULL, bar);
aeMain(el);
return 0;
}
Anthony fixed the problem by using a linked list for the list of timers, and
sent me back this patch after he tested the code in production for some time.
The code looks sane to me, so committing it to Redis.
There are too many advantages in doing this, RDB is faster to persist,
more compact, much faster to load back. The main issues here are that
the code is less tested because this was not the old default (so we are
enabling it for the new 5.0 release), and that the AOF is no longer a
trivially parsable format from now on. However the non-preamble mode
will be supported in the future as well, if new data types will be
added.
This should be more than enough, even if in case of partial IDs that are
not found, we send all the IDs to the slave/AOF, but this is definitely
a corner case without bad effects if not some wasted space.
This is a big win for caching use cases, since on reloading Redis will
still have some idea about what is worth to evict and what not.
However this only solves part of the problem because the information is
only partially propagated to slaves (on write operations). Reads will
not affect slaves LFU and LRU counters, so after a failover the eviction
decisions are kinda random until keys start to collect some aging/freq info.
However since new slaves are initially populated via RDB file transfer,
this means that if we spin up a new slave from a master, and perform an
immediate manual failover (for instance in order to upgrade the master),
the slave will have eviction informations to use for some time.
The LFU/LRU info is persisted only if the maxmemory policy is set to one
of the relevant type, even if no actual "maxmemory" memory limit is
set.
XINFO is mainly an observability command that will be used more by
humans than computers, and even when used by computers it will be a very
low traffic command. For this reason the format was changed in order to
have field names. They'll consume some bandwidth and CPU cycles, but in
this context this is much better than having to understand what the
numbers in the output array are.
