Under certain circumstances, it is very useful to be able to fail some
monitor requests. One specific case is when the number of servers in
the backend falls below a certain level. The new "monitor fail" construct
followed by either "if"/"unless" <condition> makes it possible to specify
ACL-based conditions which will make the monitor return 503 instead of
200. Any number of conditions can be passed. Another use may be to limit
the requests to local networks only.
When an HTTP server returns "404 not found", it indicates that at least
part of it is still running. For this reason, it can be convenient for
application administrators to be able to consider code 404 as valid,
but for a server which does not want to participate to load balancing
anymore. This is useful to seamlessly exclude a server from a farm
without acting on the load balancer. For instance, let's consider that
haproxy checks for the "/alive" file. To enable load balancing on a
server, the admin would simply do :
# touch /var/www/alive
And to disable the server, he would simply do :
# rm /var/www/alive
Another immediate gain from doing this is that it is now possible to
send NOTICE messages instead of ALERT messages when a server is first
disable, then goes down. This provides a graceful shutdown method.
To enable this behaviour, specify "http-check disable-on-404" in the
backend.
Hello,
You will find attached an updated release of previously submitted patch.
It polish some part and extend ACL engine to match IP and PORT parsed in
HTTP request. (and take care of comments made by Willy ! ;))
Best regards,
Alexandre
The number of possible options for a proxy has already reached
32, which is the current limit due to the fact that they are
each represented as a bit in a 32-bit word.
It's possible to move the load balancing algorithms to another
place. It will also save some space for future algorithms.
This round robin algorithm was written from trees, so that we
do not have to recompute any table when changing server weights.
This solution allows on-the-fly weight adjustments with immediate
effect on the load distribution.
There is still a limitation due to 32-bit computations, to about
2000 servers at full scale (weight 255), or more servers with
lower weights. Basically, sum(srv.weight)*4096 must be below 2^31.
Test configurations and an example program used to develop the
tree will be added next.
Many changes have been brought to the weights computations and
variables in order to accomodate for the possiblity of a server to
be running but disabled from load balancing due to a null weight.
Under some circumstances, it will be useful to be able to have
a server's effective weight bigger than the user weight, and this
is particularly true for dynamic weight-based algorithms. In order
to support this, we add a "wdiv" member to the lbprm structure
which will always be used to divide the weights before reporting
them.
Since the introduction of server weights, all load balancing algorithms
relied on a pre-computed map. Incidently, quite a bunch of map-specific
parameters were used at random places in order to get the number of
servers or their total weight. It was not architecturally acceptable
that optimizations for the map computation had impact on external parts.
For instance, during this cleanup it was found that a backend weight was
seen as 1 when only the first backup server is used, whatever its weight.
This cleanup consists in differentiating between LB-generic parameters,
such as total weights, number of servers, etc... and map-specific ones.
The struct proxy has been enhanced in order to make it easier to later
support other algorithms. The recount_servers() function now also
updates generic values such as total weights so that it's not needed
anymore to call recalc_server_map() when weights are needed. This
permitted to simplify some code which does not need to know about map
internals anymore.
It is very convenient for SNMP monitoring to have unique process ID,
proxy ID and server ID. Those have been added to the CSV outputs.
The numbers start at 1. 0 is reserved. For servers, 0 means that the
reported name is not a server name but half a proxy (FRONTEND/BACKEND).
A remaining hidden "-" in the CSV output has been eliminated too.
Some applications do not have a strict persistence requirement, yet
it is still desirable for performance considerations, due to local
caches on the servers. For some reasons, there are some applications
which cannot rely on cookies, and for which the last resort is to use
a parameter passed in the URL.
The new 'url_param' balance method is there to solve this issue. It
accepts a parameter name which is looked up from the URL and which
is then hashed to select a server. If the parameter is not found,
then the round robin algorithm is used in order to provide a normal
load balancing across the servers for the first requests. It would
have been possible to use a source IP hash instead, but since such
applications are generally buried behind multiple levels of
reverse-proxies, it would not provide a good balance.
The doc has been updated, and two regression testing configurations
have been added.
Hello,
This patch implements new statistics for SLA calculation by adding new
field 'Dwntime' with total down time since restart (both HTTP/CSV) and
extending status field (HTTP) or inserting a new one (CSV) with time
showing how long each server/backend is in a current state. Additionaly,
down transations are also calculated and displayed for backends, so it is
possible to know how many times selected backend was down, generating "No
server is available to handle this request." error.
New information are presentetd in two different ways:
- for HTTP: a "human redable form", one of "100000d 23h", "23h 59m" or
"59m 59s"
- for CSV: seconds
I believe that seconds resolution is enough.
As there are more columns in the status page I decided to shrink some
names to make more space:
- Weight -> Wght
- Check -> Chk
- Down -> Dwn
Making described changes I also made some improvements and fixed some
small bugs:
- don't increment s->health above 's->rise + s->fall - 1'. Previously it
was incremented an then (re)set to 's->rise + s->fall - 1'.
- do not set server down if it is down already
- do not set server up if it is up already
- fix colspan in multiple places (mostly introduced by my previous patch)
- add missing "status" header to CSV
- fix order of retries/redispatches in server (CSV)
- s/Tthen/Then/
- s/server/backend/ in DATA_ST_PX_BE (dumpstats.c)
Changes from previous version:
- deal with negative time intervales
- don't relay on s->state (SRV_RUNNING)
- little reworked human_time + compacted format (no spaces). If needed it
can be used in the future for other purposes by optionally making "cnt"
as an argument
- leave set_server_down mostly unchanged
- only little reworked "process_chk: 9"
- additional fields in CSV are appended to the rigth
- fix "SEC" macro
- named arguments (human_time, be_downtime, srv_downtime)
Hope it is OK. If there are only cosmetic changes needed please fill free
to correct it, however if there are some bigger changes required I would
like to discuss it first or at last to know what exactly was changed
especially since I already put this patch into my production server. :)
Thank you,
Best regards,
Krzysztof Oledzki
It is important to know how your installation performs. Haproxy masks
connection errors, which is extremely good for a client but it is bad for
an administrator (except people believing that "ignorance is a bless").
Attached patch adds retries and redispatches counters, so now haproxy:
1. For server:
- counts retried connections (masked or not)
2. For backends:
- counts retried connections (masked or not) that happened to
a slave server
- counts redispatched connections
- does not count successfully redispatched connections as backend errors.
Errors are increased only when client does not get a valid response,
in other words: with failed redispatch or when this function is not
enabled.
3. For statistics:
- display Retr (retries) and Redis (redispatches) as a "Warning"
information.
A new generic protocol mechanism has been added. It provides
an easy method to implement new protocols with different
listeners (eg: unix sockets).
The listeners are automatically started at the right moment
and enabled after the possible fork().
src/chtbl.c, src/hashpjw.c and src/list.c are distributed under
an obscure license. While Aleks and I believe that this license
is OK for haproxy, other people think it is not compatible with
the GPL.
Whether it is or not is not the problem. The fact that it rises
a doubt is sufficient for this problem to be addressed. Arnaud
Cornet rewrote the unclear parts with clean GPLv2 and LGPL code.
The hash algorithm has changed too and the code has been slightly
simplified in the process. A lot of care has been taken in order
to respect the original API as much as possible, including the
LGPL for the exportable parts.
The new code has not been thoroughly tested but it looks OK now.
When a very large number of servers is configured (thousands),
shutting down many of them at once could lead to large number
of calls to recalc_server_map() which already takes some time.
This would result in an O(N^3) computation time, leading to
noticeable pauses on slow embedded CPUs on test platforms.
Instead, mark the map as dirty and recalc it only when needed.
The new "use_backend" keyword permits full content switching by the
use of ACLs. Its usage is simple :
use_backend <backend_name> {if|unless} <acl_cond>
The timeout functions were difficult to manipulate because they were
rounding results to the millisecond. Thus, it was difficult to compare
and to check what expired and what did not. Also, the comparison
functions were heavy with multiplies and divides by 1000. Now, all
timeouts are stored in timevals, reducing the number of operations
for updates and leading to cleaner and more efficient code.
The new 'block' keyword makes it possible to block a request based on
ACL test results. Block accepts two optional arguments : 'if' <cond>
and 'unless' <cond>.
The request will be blocked with a 403 response if the condition is validated
(if) or if it is not (unless). Do not rely on this one too much, as it's more
of a proof of concept helping in developing other matches.
The fiprm and beprm were added to ease the transition between
a single listener mode to frontends+backends. They are no longer
needed and make the code a bit more complicated. Remove them.
Patch from Bryan Germann for 1.2.17.
In some circumstances, it is useful not to add the X-Forwarded-For
header, for instance when the client is another reverse-proxy or
stunnel running on the same machine and which already adds it. This
patch adds the "except" keyword to the "forwardfor" option, allowing
to specify an address or network which will not be added to this
header.
The stats page could not tell the difference between a FE and a BE.
It has been revamped to indicate all relevant information. The font
is also slightly smaller in order for all the info to fit into small
screens. The data output path has been greatly simplified to use
string chunks.
The notion of capabilities has been added to the proxy so that we
know whether a proxy supports frontend, backend, or rulesets. Given
this, some parameters are optionnal, some are ignored with a warning
and others are forbidden. It is now possible to write valid two level
configs without binding to dummy address/ports.
The maxconn argument is used only for the listeners, and the
fullconn is used only for the backends. If unset, it inherits
maxconn's value which itself can inherit the default or the
global value (we might need to change this).
HTTP error messages were all specific cases handled by an IF.
Now they are all in an array so that it will be easier to add
new ones. Also, the return functions now use chunks as inputs
so that it should be easier to provide alternative return
messages if needed.
The nbconn attribute in the proxies was not relevant anymore because
a frontend A may use backend B and both of them must account for their
respective connections. For this reason, there now are two separate
counters for frontend and backend connections.
The stats page has been updated to reflect the backend, but a separate
line entry for the frontend with error counts would be good.
Note that as of now, beconn may be higher than maxconn, because maxconn
applies to the frontend, while beconn may be increased due to sessions
passed from another frontend.
A proxy will be able to borrow parameters from another one.
In particular, the filters will be inheritable from another
proxy, and the backend parameters too.
This structure will consume 4 bytes per header to keep track of
headers within a request or a response without having to parse
the whole request for each regex. As it's not possible to allocate
only 4 bytes, we define a max number of HTTP headers. We set it
to (BUFSIZE+79)/80 so that 8kB buffers can contain 100 headers
(like Apache), resulting in 400 bytes dedicated to indexation,
or about 400/(2*8kB) ~= 2.4% of the memory usage.
Using the cttproxy kernel patch, it's possible to bind to any source
address. It is highly recommended to use the 03-natdel patch with the
other ones.
A new keyword appears as a complement to the "source" keyword : "usesrc".
The source address is mandatory and must be valid on the interface which
will see the packets. The "usesrc" option supports "client" (for full
client_ip:client_port spoofing), "client_ip" (for client_ip spoofing)
and any 'IP[:port]' combination to pretend to be another machine.
Right now, the source binding is missing from server health-checks if
set to another address. It must be implemented (think restricted firewalls).
The doc is still missing too.
This makes it possible to relay SSL connections in pure TCP instances while
ensuring the remote end really receives our data eventhough intermediate
agents (firewalls, proxies, ...) might acknowledge the connection.
The files are now stored under :
- include/haproxy for the generic includes
- include/types.h for the structures needed within prototypes
- include/proto.h for function prototypes and inline functions
- src/*.c for the C files
Most include files are now covered by LGPL. A last move still needs
to be done to put inline functions under GPL and not LGPL.
Version has been set to 1.3.0 in the code but some control still
needs to be done before releasing.
