BUG/MEDIUM: h2: don't accept new streams if conn_streams are still in excess
The streams bookkeeping made in H2 is used for protocol compliance only
but it doesn't consider the number of conn_streams still attached to the
mux. It causes an issue when http-request set-nice rules are applied on
H2 requests processed on a saturated machine. Indeed, in this case, the
requests are accepted and assigned a default nice value of zero. When
they are processed, their nice value changes to a higher one (say 1024).
The response is sent through the H2 mux, which detects the end of stream
and decrements the protocol-level stream count (h2c->nb_streams). The
client may then send a new request. But the conn_stream is still attached
and will require a new call to process_stream() to finish, which is made
through the scheduler. Given that the machine is saturated, it is assumed
that many tasks are present in the scheduler. Thus the closing tasks holding
a higher nice value will pass after the new stream creations. If the client
is fast enough with a low latency link, it may add a lot of new stream
creations before the stream terminations have a chance to disappear due
to their high nice value, resulting in a huge amount of memory being used.
The solution consists in letting a mux always monitor its conn_streams and
refrain from creating new ones when it is full. Here the H2 mux checks the
nb_cs counter and sets a new blocked flag (H2_CF_DEM_TOOMANY) if the limit
was reached, so that the frame parser requests a pause in the new stream
creation, leaving some time for the pending conn_streams to vanish.
Several experiments were made using varying thresholds to see if
overbooking would provide any benefit here but it turned out not to be
the case, so the conn_stream limit remains set to the exact streams
limit. Interestingly various performance measurements showed that the
code tends to be slightly faster now than without the limit, probably
due to the smoother memory usage.
This commit requires previous patch ("MINOR: h2: keep a count of the number
of conn_streams attached to the mux"). It needs to be backported to 1.8.
1 file changed