Worker is now the base class of all workers. It has a message
queue and can be run in a thread of its own, or in the calling
thread. Worker can not be used as such, but a concrete worker
class must be derived from it. Currently there is only one
concrete class RoutingWorker.
There is some overlapping in functionality between Worker and
RoutingWorker, as there is e.g. a need for broadcasting a
message to all routing workers, but not to other workers.
Currently other workers can not be created as the array for
holding the pointers to the workers is exactly as large as
there will be RoutingWorkers. That will be changed so that
the maximum number of threads is hardwired to some ridiculous
value such as 128. That's the first step in the path towards
a situation where the number of worker threads can be changed
at runtime.
A new class mxs::Worker will be introduced and mxs::RoutingWorker
will be inherited from that. mxs::Worker will basically only be a
thread with a message-loop.
Once available, all current non-worker threads (but the one
implicitly created by microhttpd) can be creating by inheriting
from that; in practice that means the housekeeping thread, all
monitor threads and possibly the logging thread.
The benefit of this arrangement is that there then will be a general
mechanism for cross thread communication without having to use any
shared data structures.
The old hkheartbeat variable was changed to the mxs_clock() function that
simply wraps an atomic load of the variable. This allows it to be
correctly read by MaxScale as well as opening up the possibility of
converting the value load to a relaxed memory order read.
Renamed the header and associated macros. Removed inclusion of the
heartbeat header from the housekeeper header and added it to the files
that were missing it.
With a granularity of 1 second, the load will from a human
perspective reflect the current situation. That also means
that the maxadmin output shows "natural" steps; 1s, 1m and 1h.
By definition, the load is calculated using the following formula:
L = 100 * ((T - t) / T)
where T is a time period and t the time of that period that the worker
spends in epoll_wait(). So, if there is so much work that epoll_wait()
always returns immediately, then the load is 100 and if the thread
spends the entire period in epoll_wait(), then the load is 0.
The basic idea is that the timeout given to epoll_wait() is adjusted
so that epoll_wait() will always return roughly at 10 seconds interval.
By making a note of when we are about to enter epoll_wait() and when we
return from it, we have all the information we need for calculating the
load.
Due to the nature of things, we will not be able to calculate the load
at exact 10-second boundaries, but it will be pretty close. And the load
is always calculated using the true length of the period.
We will then calculate 1 minute load by averaging the load value for 6
consecutive 10-second periods and the 1 hour load by averaging the load
value of 60 consecutive 1 minute loads.
So, while the 10-second load represents the load of the most recently
measured 10-second period (and not the load of the most recent 10
seconds), the 1 minute load and the 1 hour load represents the load of
the most recent minute and hour respectively.
The internal header directory conflicted with in-source builds causing a
build failure. This is fixed by renaming the internal header directory to
something other than maxscale.
The renaming pointed out a few problems in a couple of source files that
appeared to include internal headers when the headers were in fact public
headers.
Fixed maxctrl in-source builds by making the copying of the sources
optional.
The old polling message system is obsolete now that the worker messages
are implemented. The old system was only used to clean up the persistent
connection pool of a server.
Now the statistics is in a single structure and the property of the
Worker instance in question. Methods are provided for obtaining the
statistics of all workers in one go.
The existing load calculation does not fit the 2.0 thread approach
that well. So it is removed entirely now, to be replaced with some
new approach later.
Showing dcb addresses, the number of fds and the events is
meaningless as the information is completely transient and
is likely to have changed the moment is was displayed.
Just like the thread stats and poll stats earlier, the queue stats
are now moved to worker.
A litte refactoring still, and the polling will only work on local
data.
Each worker now has a separate structure for collecting the
polling statistics that is passed to epoll_waitevents(). When
the stats are asked for, we loop over all separate stats and
combine them. So, instead of having every statistics of each
thread one cacheline apart, each thread has all its statistics
in one lump that, for obvious reasons, are going to be apart.
The primary purpose of this excersize is to remove the hardwired
nature of the statistics collection. For instance, the admin
thread will be doing I/O but that I/O should not be included
in the statistics of the workers.
Now the epoll instance of the Worker is used when polling. The
work is still done in poll.cc and the worker provides the descriptor
and thread id.
The comments of poll_waitevents() have been removed; they were not
accurate anymore so better to let the code speak for itself.
This is not globally safe yet, but all other access is directly or
indirectly related to maxadmin, which is irrelevant as far as
performance testing is concerned.
The shutdown is now performed so that a shutdown message is
sent to all workers. When the workers receive that message, they
turn on a shutdown flag, which subsequently is checked in the poll
loop.
The whole worker thread mechanism assumes EPOLLET and non-blocking
descriptors, so that should be the default.
TODO: In debug mode, check that the provided file descriptor indeed
is non-blocking.
The handler callback should now return a bitmask with bits set
according to what it did when it was called. That way the actual
statistics gathering can be done in poll_waitevents() and the
handler need not be aware of any thread structs.
Actually, the only thing that needs any assistance is accept handling,
because in poll_waitevents() we do not know whether a READ event
relates to a listening or a normal socket, that is, should the
event be counted as an accept or as a read.
This is just a first step in a trial that will allow the addition
of any file descriptor to the general poll mechanism and hence
allow any i/o to be handled by the worker threads.
There is a structure
typedef struct mxs_poll_data
{
void (*handler)(struct mxs_poll_data *data, int wid, uint32_t events);
struct
{
int id;
} thread;
} MXS_POLL_DATA;
that any other structure (e.g. a DCB) encapsulating a file descriptor must
have as its first member (a C++ struct could basically derive from it).
That structure contains two members; 'handler' and 'thread.id'. Handler is a
pointer to a function taking a pointer to a struct mxs_poll_data, a worker thread
if and an epoll event mask as argument.
So, DCB is modified to have MXS_POLL_DATA as its first member and 'handler'
is initialized with a function that *knows* the passed MXS_POLL_DATA can
be downcast to a DCB.
process_pollq no longer exists, but is now called process_pollq_dcb. The
general stuff related to statistics etc. will be moved to poll_waitevents
itself after which the whole function is moved to dcb.c. At that point,
the handler pointer will be set in dcb_alloc().
Effectively poll.[h|c] will provide a generic mechanism for listening on
whatever descriptors and the dcb stuff will be part of dcb.[h|c].
