The previous code using a static buffer as an optimization was lame:
1) Premature optimization, actually it was *slower* than naive code
because resulted into the creation / destruction of the object
encapsulating the output buffer.
2) The code was very hard to test, since it was needed to have specific
tests for command lines exceeding the size of the static buffer.
3) As a result of "2" the code was bugged as the current tests were not
able to stress specific corner cases.
It was replaced with easy to understand code that is safer and faster.
During the replication full resynchronization process, the RDB file is
transfered from the master to the slave. However there is a short
preamble to send, that is currently just the bulk payload length of the
file in the usual Redis form $..length..<CR><LF>.
This preamble used to be sent with a direct write call, assuming that
there was alway room in the socket output buffer to hold the few bytes
needed, however this does not scale in case we'll need to send more
stuff, and is not very robust code in general.
This commit introduces a more general mechanism to send a preamble up to
2GB in size (the max length of an sds string) in a non blocking way.
Clients using SYNC to replicate are older implementations, such as
redis-cli --slave, and are not designed to acknowledge the master with
REPLCONF ACK commands, so we don't have any feedback and should not
disconnect them on timeout.
This code is only responsible to take an LRU-evicted fixed length cache
of SHA1 that we are sure all the slaves received.
In this commit only the implementation is provided, but the Redis core
does not use it to actually send EVALSHA to slaves when possible.
This feature allows the user to specify the minimum number of
connected replicas having a lag less or equal than the specified
amount of seconds for writes to be accepted.
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 we are preparing an handshake with the slave we can't touch the
connection buffer as it'll be used to accumulate differences between
the sent RDB file and what arrives next from clients.
So in short we can't use addReply() family functions.
However we just use write(2) because we know that the socket buffer is
empty, since a prerequisite for SYNC to work is that the static buffer
and the output list are empty, and in general it is not expected that a
client SYNCs after doing some heavy I/O with the master.
However a short write connection is explicitly handled to avoid
fragility (we simply close the connection and the slave will retry).
SELECT was still transmitted to slaves using the inline protocol, that
is conceived mostly for humans to type into telnet sessions, and is
notably not understood by redis-cli --slave.
Now the new protocol is used instead.
A Redis master sends PING commands to slaves from time to time: doing
this ensures that even if absence of writes, the master->slave channel
remains active and the slave can feel the master presence, instead of
closing the connection for timeout.
This commit changes the way PINGs are sent to slaves in order to use the
standard interface used to replicate all the other commands, that is,
the function replicationFeedSlaves().
With this change the stream of commands sent to every slave is exactly
the same regardless of their exact state (Transferring RDB for first
synchronization or slave already online). With the previous
implementation the PING was only sent to online slaves, with the result
that the output stream from master to slaves was not identical for all
the slaves: this is a problem if we want to implement partial resyncs in
the future using a global replication stream offset.
TL;DR: this commit should not change the behaviour in practical terms,
but is just something in preparation for partial resynchronization
support.
Before this commit every Redis slave had its own selected database ID
state. This was not actually useful as the emitted stream of commands
is identical for all the slaves.
Now the the currently selected database is a global state that is set to
-1 when a new slave is attached, in order to force the SELECT command to
be re-emitted for all the slaves.
This change is useful in order to implement replication partial
resynchronization in the future, as makes sure that the stream of
commands received by slaves, including SELECT commands, are exactly the
same for every slave connected, at any time.
In this way we could have a global offset that can identify a specific
piece of the master -> slaves stream of commands.
Further details from @antirez:
It was reported by @StopForumSpam on Twitter that the Redis replication
link was strangely using multiple TCP packets for multiple commands.
This wastes a lot of bandwidth and is due to the TCP_NODELAY option we
enable on the socket after accepting a new connection.
However the master -> slave channel is a one-way channel since Redis
replication is asynchronous, so there is no point in trying to reduce
the latency, we should aim to reduce the bandwidth. For this reason this
commit introduces the ability to disable the nagle algorithm on the
socket after a successful SYNC.
This feature is off by default because the delay can be up to 40
milliseconds with normally configured Linux kernels.
Issue #828 shows how Redis was not correctly undoing a non-blocking
connection attempt with the previous master when the master was set to a
new address using the SLAVEOF command.
This was also a result of lack of refactoring, so now there is a
function to cancel the non blocking handshake with the master.
The new function is now used when SLAVEOF NO ONE is called or when
SLAVEOF is used to set the master to a different address.
REDIS_HZ is the frequency our serverCron() function is called with.
A more frequent call to this function results into less latency when the
server is trying to handle very expansive background operations like
mass expires of a lot of keys at the same time.
Redis 2.4 used to have an HZ of 10. This was good enough with almost
every setup, but the incremental key expiration algorithm was working a
bit better under *extreme* pressure when HZ was set to 100 for Redis
2.6.
However for most users a latency spike of 30 milliseconds when million
of keys are expiring at the same time is acceptable, on the other hand a
default HZ of 100 in Redis 2.6 was causing idle instances to use some
CPU time compared to Redis 2.4. The CPU usage was in the order of 0.3%
for an idle instance, however this is a shame as more energy is consumed
by the server, if not important resources.
This commit introduces HZ as a runtime parameter, that can be queried by
INFO or CONFIG GET, and can be modified with CONFIG SET. At the same
time the default frequency is set back to 10.
In this way we default to a sane value of 10, but allows users to
easily switch to values up to 500 for near real-time applications if
needed and if they are willing to pay this small CPU usage penalty.
The new message now contains an hint about modifying the repl-timeout
configuration directive if the problem persists.
This should normally not be needed, because while the master generates
the RDB file it makes sure to send newlines to the replication channel
to prevent timeouts. However there are times when masters running on
very slow systems can completely stop for seconds during the RDB saving
process. In such a case enlarging the timeout value can fix the problem.
See issue #695 for an example of this problem in an EC2 deployment.
During the first synchronization step of the replication process, a Redis
slave connects with the master in a non blocking way. However once the
connection is established the replication continues sending the REPLCONF
command, and sometimes the AUTH command if needed. Those commands are
send in a partially blocking way (blocking with timeout in the order of
seconds).
Because it is common for a blocked master to accept connections even if
it is actually not able to reply to the slave requests, it was easy for
a slave to block if the master had serious issues, but was still able to
accept connections in the listening socket.
For this reason we now send an asynchronous PING request just after the
non blocking connection ended in a successful way, and wait for the
reply before to continue with the replication process. It is very
unlikely that a master replying to PING can't reply to the other
commands.
This solution was proposed by Didier Spezia (Thanks!) so that we don't
need to turn all the replication process into a non blocking affair, but
still the probability of a slave blocked is minimal even in the event of
a failing master.
Also we now use getsockopt(SO_ERROR) in order to check errors ASAP
in the event handler, instead of waiting for actual I/O to return an
error.
This commit fixes issue #632.
