There is a new 'lag' information in the list of slaves, in the
"replication" section of the INFO output.
Also the format was changed in a backward incompatible way in order to
make it more easy to parse if new fields are added in the future, as the
new format is comma separated but has named fields (no longer positional
fields).
Now masters, using the time at which the last REPLCONF ACK was received,
are able to explicitly disconnect slaves that are no longer responding.
Previously the only chance was to see a very long output buffer, that
was highly suboptimal.
ACKs can be also used as a base for synchronous replication. However in
that case they'll be explicitly requested by the master when the client
sends a request that needs to be replicated synchronously.
This special command is used by the slave to inform the master the
amount of replication stream it currently consumed.
it does not return anything so that we not need to consume additional
bandwidth needed by the master to reply something.
The master can do a number of things knowing the amount of stream
processed, such as understanding the "lag" in bytes of the slave, verify
if a given command was already processed by the slave, and so forth.
When master send commands, there is no need for the slave to reply.
Redis used to queue the reply in the output buffer and discard the reply
later, this is a waste of work and it is not clear why it was this way
(I sincerely don't remember).
This commit changes it in order to don't queue the reply at all.
All tests passing.
Also the logfile option was modified to always have an explicit value
and to log to stdout when an empty string is used as log file.
Previously there was special handling of the string "stdout" that set
the logfile to NULL, this always required some special handling.
This reverts commit 2c75f2cf1a.
After further analysis, it is very unlikely that we'll raise the
string size limit to > 512MB, and at the same time such big strings
will be used in 32 bit systems.
Better to revert to size_t so that 32 bit processors will not be
forced to use a 64 bit counter in normal operations, that is currently
completely useless.
When the PONG delay is half the cluster node timeout, the link gets
disconnected (and later automatically reconnected) in order to ensure
that it's not just a dead connection issue.
However this operation is only performed if the link is old enough, in
order to avoid to disconnect the same link again and again (and among
the other problems, never receive the PONG because of that).
Note: when the link is reconnected, the 'ping_sent' field is not updated
even if a new ping is sent using the new connection, so we can still
reliably detect a node ping timeout.
