This patch looks huge, but it has a very simple goal: protect all
accessed to shared stats pointers (either read or writes), because
we know consider that these pointers may be NULL.
The reason behind this is despite all precautions taken to ensure the
pointers shouldn't be NULL when not expected, there are still corner
cases (ie: frontends stats used on a backend which no FE cap and vice
versa) where we could try to access a memory area which is not
allocated. Willy stumbled on such cases while playing with the rings
servers upon connection error, which eventually led to process crashes
(since 3.3 when shared stats were implemented)
Also, we may decide later that shared stats are optional and should
be disabled on the proxy to save memory and CPU, and this patch is
a step further towards that goal.
So in essence, this patch ensures shared stats pointers are always
initialized (including NULL), and adds necessary guards before shared
stats pointers are de-referenced. Since we already had some checks
for backends and listeners stats, and the pointer address retrieval
should stay in cpu cache, let's hope that this patch doesn't impact
stats performance much.
counters_{fe,be}_shared_prepare now take an extra <errmsg> parameter
that contains additional hints about the error in case of failure.
It must be freed accordingly since it is allocated using memprintf
75e480d10 ("MEDIUM: stats: avoid 1 indirection by storing the shared
stats directly in counters struct") took care of renaming
counters_fe_shared_init() but we forgot counters_be_shared_init().
Let's fix that for consistency
Between 3.2 and 3.3-dev we noticed a noticeable performance regression
due to stats handling. After bisecting, Willy found out that recent
work to split stats computing accross multiple thread groups (stats
sharding) was responsible for that performance regression. We're looking
at roughly 20% performance loss.
More precisely, it is the added indirections, multiplied by the number
of statistics that are updated for each request, which in the end causes
a significant amount of time being spent resolving pointers.
We noticed that the fe_counters_shared and be_counters_shared structures
which are currently allocated in dedicated memory since a0dcab5c
("MAJOR: counters: add shared counters base infrastructure")
are no longer huge since 16eb0fab31 ("MAJOR: counters: dispatch counters
over thread groups") because they now essentially hold flags plus the
per-thread group id pointer mapping, not the counters themselves.
As such we decided to try merging fe_counters_shared and
be_counters_shared in their parent structures. The cost is slight memory
overhead for the parent structure, but it allows to get rid of one
pointer indirection. This patch alone yields visible performance gains
and almost restores 3.2 stats performance.
counters_fe_shared_get() was renamed to counters_fe_shared_prepare() and
now returns either failure or success instead of a pointer because we
don't need to retrieve a shared pointer anymore, the function takes care
of initializing existing pointer.
Most fe and be counters are good candidates for being shared between
processes. They are now grouped inside "shared" struct sub member under
be_counters and fe_counters.
Now they are properly identified, they would greatly benefit from being
shared over thread groups to reduce the cost of atomic operations when
updating them. For this, we take the current tgid into account so each
thread group only updates its own counters. For this to work, it is
mandatory that the "shared" member from {fe,be}_counters is initialized
AFTER global.nbtgroups is known, because each shared counter causes the stat
to be allocated lobal.nbtgroups times. When updating a counter without
concurrency, the first counter from the array may be updated.
To consult the shared counters (which requires aggregation of per-tgid
individual counters), some helper functions were added to counter.h to
ease code maintenance and avoid computing errors.
create include/haproxy/counters.h and src/counters.c files to anticipate
for further helpers as some counters specific tasks needs to be carried
out and since counters are shared between multiple object types (ie:
listener, proxy, server..) we need generic helpers.
Add some shared counters helper which are not yet used but will be updated
in upcoming commits.
