HTTP compression has been rewritten to use the filter API. This is more a PoC
than other thing for now. It allocates memory to work. So, if only for that, it
should be rewritten.
In the mean time, the implementation has been refactored to allow its use with
other filters. However, there are limitations that should be respected:
- No filter placed after the compression one is allowed to change input data
(in 'http_data' callback).
- No filter placed before the compression one is allowed to change forwarded
data (in 'http_forward_data' callback).
For now, these limitations are informal, so you should be careful when you use
several filters.
About the configuration, 'compression' keywords are still supported and must be
used to configure the HTTP compression behavior. In absence of a 'filter' line
for the compression filter, it is added in the filter chain when the first
compression' line is parsed. This is an easy way to do when you do not use other
filters. But another filter exists, an error is reported so that the user must
explicitly declare the filter.
For example:
listen tst
...
compression algo gzip
compression offload
...
filter flt_1
filter compression
filter flt_2
...
This library is designed to emit a zlib-compatible stream with no
memory usage and to favor resource savings over compression ratio.
While zlib requires 256 kB of RAM per compression context (and can only
support 4000 connections per GB of RAM), the stateless compression
offered by libslz does not need to retain buffers between subsequent
calls. In theory this slightly reduces the compression ratio but in
practice it does not have that much of an effect since the zlib
window is limited to 32kB.
Libslz is available at :
http://git.1wt.eu/web?p=libslz.git
It was designed for web compression and provides a lot of savings
over zlib in haproxy. Here are the preliminary results on a single
core of a core2-quad 3.0 GHz in 32-bit for only 300 concurrent
sessions visiting the home page of www.haproxy.org (76 kB) with
the default 16kB buffers :
BW In BW Out BW Saved Ratio memory VSZ/RSS
zlib 237 Mbps 92 Mbps 145 Mbps 2.58 84M / 69M
slz 733 Mbps 380 Mbps 353 Mbps 1.93 5.9M / 4.2M
So while the compression ratio is lower, the bandwidth savings are
much more important due to the significantly lower compression cost
which allows to consume even more data from the servers. In the
example above, zlib became the bottleneck at 24% of the output
bandwidth. Also the difference in memory usage is obvious.
More tests run on a single core of a core i5-3320M, with 500 concurrent
users and the default 16kB buffers :
At 100% CPU (no limit) :
BW In BW Out BW Saved Ratio memory VSZ/RSS hits/s
zlib 480 Mbps 188 Mbps 292 Mbps 2.55 130M / 101M 744
slz 1700 Mbps 810 Mbps 890 Mbps 2.10 23.7M / 9.7M 2382
At 85% CPU (limited) :
BW In BW Out BW Saved Ratio memory VSZ/RSS hits/s
zlib 1240 Mbps 976 Mbps 264 Mbps 1.27 130M / 100M 1738
slz 1600 Mbps 976 Mbps 624 Mbps 1.64 23.7M / 9.7M 2210
The most important benefit really happens when the CPU usage is
limited by "maxcompcpuusage" or the BW limited by "maxcomprate" :
in order to preserve resources, haproxy throttles the compression
ratio until usage is within limits. Since slz is much cheaper, the
average compression ratio is much higher and the input bandwidth
is quite higher for one Gbps output.
Other tests made with some reference files :
BW In BW Out BW Saved Ratio hits/s
daniels.html zlib 1320 Mbps 163 Mbps 1157 Mbps 8.10 1925
slz 3600 Mbps 580 Mbps 3020 Mbps 6.20 5300
tv.com/listing zlib 980 Mbps 124 Mbps 856 Mbps 7.90 310
slz 3300 Mbps 553 Mbps 2747 Mbps 5.97 1100
jquery.min.js zlib 430 Mbps 180 Mbps 250 Mbps 2.39 547
slz 1470 Mbps 764 Mbps 706 Mbps 1.92 1815
bootstrap.min.css zlib 790 Mbps 165 Mbps 625 Mbps 4.79 777
slz 2450 Mbps 650 Mbps 1800 Mbps 3.77 2400
So on top of saving a lot of memory, slz is constantly 2.5-3.5 times
faster than zlib and results in providing more savings for a fixed CPU
usage. For links smaller than 100 Mbps, zlib still provides a better
compression ratio, at the expense of a much higher CPU usage.
Larger input files provide slightly higher bandwidth for both libs, at
the expense of a bit more memory usage for zlib (it converges to 256kB
per connection).
This function used to take a zlib-specific flag as argument to indicate
whether a buffer flush or end of contents was met, let's split it in two
so that we don't depend on zlib anymore.
Thanks to MSIE/IIS, the "deflate" name is ambigous. According to the RFC
it's a zlib-wrapped deflate stream, but IIS used to send only a raw deflate
stream, which is the only format MSIE understands for "deflate". The other
widely used browsers do support both formats. For this reason some people
prefer to emit a raw deflate stream on "deflate" to serve more users even
it that means violating the standards. Haproxy only follows the standard,
so they cannot do this.
This patch makes it possible to have one algorithm name in the configuration
and another one in the protocol. This will make it possible to have a new
configuration token to add a different algorithm so that users can decide if
they want a raw deflate or the standard one.
This patch makes changes in the http_response_forward_body state
machine. It checks if the compress algorithm had consumed data before
swapping the temporary and the input buffer. So it prevents null sized
zlib chunks.
Don't use the zlib allocator anymore, 5 pools are used for the zlib
compression. Their sizes depends of the window size and the memLevel in
deflateInit2.
The window size and the memlevel of the zlib are now configurable using
global options tune.zlib.memlevel and tune.zlib.windowsize.
It affects the memory consumption of the zlib.
The build was dependent of the zlib.h header, regardless of the USE_ZLIB
option. The fix consists of several #ifdef in the source code.
It removes the overhead of the zstream structure in the session when you
don't use the option.
This commit introduces HTTP compression using the zlib library.
http_response_forward_body has been modified to call the compression
functions.
This feature includes 3 algorithms: identity, gzip and deflate:
* identity: this is mostly for debugging, and it was useful for
developping the compression feature. With Content-Length in input, it
is making each chunk with the data available in the current buffer.
With chunks in input, it is rechunking, the output chunks will be
bigger or smaller depending of the size of the input chunk and the
size of the buffer. Identity does not apply any change on data.
* gzip: same as identity, but applying a gzip compression. The data
are deflated using the Z_NO_FLUSH flag in zlib. When there is no more
data in the input buffer, it flushes the data in the output buffer
(Z_SYNC_FLUSH). At the end of data, when it receives the last chunk in
input, or when there is no more data to read, it writes the end of
data with Z_FINISH and the ending chunk.
* deflate: same as gzip, but with deflate algorithm and zlib format.
Note that this algorithm has ambiguous support on many browsers and
no support at all from recent ones. It is strongly recommended not
to use it for anything else than experimentation.
You can't choose the compression ratio at the moment, it will be set to
Z_BEST_SPEED (1), as tests have shown very little benefit in terms of
compression ration when going above for HTML contents, at the cost of
a massive CPU impact.
Compression will be activated depending of the Accept-Encoding request
header. With identity, it does not take care of that header.
To build HAProxy with zlib support, use USE_ZLIB=1 in the make
parameters.
This work was initially started by David Du Colombier at Exceliance.
