Data can now be stored on thread-local storage of the worker. By acquiring
a unique handle from the worker, a module can store a thread-local
value.
This functionality will be used to store configurations that are sometimes
updated at runtime but are largely read-only. By avoiding shared data
altogether, performance is not affected. The only synchronization that is
done is on update.
Also added a helper functions for broadcasting tasks on all routing
workers. With the old mxs_rworker_broadcast_message function, if a
function call was broadcasted it was always queued for execution. The
mxs_rworker_broadcast will immediately execute the task on the local
worker and queue it for execution of other routing workers.
The id has now been moved from mxs::Worker to mxs::RoutingWorker
and the implications are felt in many places.
The primary need for the id was to be able to access worker specfic
data, maintained outside of a routing worker, when given a worker
(the id is used to index into an array). Slightly related to that
was the need to be able to iterate over all workers. That obviously
implies some kind of collection.
That causes all sorts of issues if there is a need for being able
to create and destroy a worker at runtime. With the id removed from
mxs::Worker all those issues are gone, and its perfectly ok to create
and destory mxs::Workers as needed.
Further, while there is a need to broadcast a particular message to
all _routing_ workers, it hardly makes sense to broadcast a particular
message too _all_ workers. Consequently, only routing workers are kept
in a collection and all static member functions dealing with all
workers (e.g. broadcast) have now been moved to mxs::RoutingWorker.
Now, instead of passing the id around we instead deal directly
with the worker pointer. Later the data in all those external arrays
will be moved into mxs::[Worker|RoutingWorker] so that worker related
data is maintained in exactly one place.
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.
