If a thread unblocks a client blocked in a module command, by using the
RedisMdoule_UnblockClient() API, the event loop may not be awaken until
the next timeout of the multiplexing API or the next unrelated I/O
operation on other clients. We actually want the client to be served
ASAP, so a mechanism is needed in order for the unblocking API to inform
Redis that there is a client to serve ASAP.
This commit fixes the issue using the old trick of the pipe: when a
client needs to be unblocked, a byte is written in a pipe. When we run
the list of clients blocked in modules, we consume all the bytes
written in the pipe. Writes and reads are performed inside the context
of the mutex, so no race is possible in which we consume the bytes that
are actually related to an awake request for a client that should still
be put into the list of clients to unblock.
It was verified that after the fix the server handles the blocked
clients with the expected short delay.
Thanks to @dvirsky for understanding there was such a problem and
reporting it.
If a thread unblocks a client blocked in a module command, by using the
RedisMdoule_UnblockClient() API, the event loop may not be awaken until
the next timeout of the multiplexing API or the next unrelated I/O
operation on other clients. We actually want the client to be served
ASAP, so a mechanism is needed in order for the unblocking API to inform
Redis that there is a client to serve ASAP.
This commit fixes the issue using the old trick of the pipe: when a
client needs to be unblocked, a byte is written in a pipe. When we run
the list of clients blocked in modules, we consume all the bytes
written in the pipe. Writes and reads are performed inside the context
of the mutex, so no race is possible in which we consume the bytes that
are actually related to an awake request for a client that should still
be put into the list of clients to unblock.
It was verified that after the fix the server handles the blocked
clients with the expected short delay.
Thanks to @dvirsky for understanding there was such a problem and
reporting it.
This change attempts to switch to an hash function which mitigates
the effects of the HashDoS attack (denial of service attack trying
to force data structures to worst case behavior) while at the same time
providing Redis with an hash function that does not expect the input
data to be word aligned, a condition no longer true now that sds.c
strings have a varialbe length header.
Note that it is possible sometimes that even using an hash function
for which collisions cannot be generated without knowing the seed,
special implementation details or the exposure of the seed in an
indirect way (for example the ability to add elements to a Set and
check the return in which Redis returns them with SMEMBERS) may
make the attacker's life simpler in the process of trying to guess
the correct seed, however the next step would be to switch to a
log(N) data structure when too many items in a single bucket are
detected: this seems like an overkill in the case of Redis.
SPEED REGRESION TESTS:
In order to verify that switching from MurmurHash to SipHash had
no impact on speed, a set of benchmarks involving fast insertion
of 5 million of keys were performed.
The result shows Redis with SipHash in high pipelining conditions
to be about 4% slower compared to using the previous hash function.
However this could partially be related to the fact that the current
implementation does not attempt to hash whole words at a time but
reads single bytes, in order to have an output which is endian-netural
and at the same time working on systems where unaligned memory accesses
are a problem.
Further X86 specific optimizations should be tested, the function
may easily get at the same level of MurMurHash2 if a few optimizations
are performed.
This change attempts to switch to an hash function which mitigates
the effects of the HashDoS attack (denial of service attack trying
to force data structures to worst case behavior) while at the same time
providing Redis with an hash function that does not expect the input
data to be word aligned, a condition no longer true now that sds.c
strings have a varialbe length header.
Note that it is possible sometimes that even using an hash function
for which collisions cannot be generated without knowing the seed,
special implementation details or the exposure of the seed in an
indirect way (for example the ability to add elements to a Set and
check the return in which Redis returns them with SMEMBERS) may
make the attacker's life simpler in the process of trying to guess
the correct seed, however the next step would be to switch to a
log(N) data structure when too many items in a single bucket are
detected: this seems like an overkill in the case of Redis.
SPEED REGRESION TESTS:
In order to verify that switching from MurmurHash to SipHash had
no impact on speed, a set of benchmarks involving fast insertion
of 5 million of keys were performed.
The result shows Redis with SipHash in high pipelining conditions
to be about 4% slower compared to using the previous hash function.
However this could partially be related to the fact that the current
implementation does not attempt to hash whole words at a time but
reads single bytes, in order to have an output which is endian-netural
and at the same time working on systems where unaligned memory accesses
are a problem.
Further X86 specific optimizations should be tested, the function
may easily get at the same level of MurMurHash2 if a few optimizations
are performed.
BACKGROUND AND USE CASEj
Redis slaves are normally write only, however the supprot a "writable"
mode which is very handy when scaling reads on slaves, that actually
need write operations in order to access data. For instance imagine
having slaves replicating certain Sets keys from the master. When
accessing the data on the slave, we want to peform intersections between
such Sets values. However we don't want to intersect each time: to cache
the intersection for some time often is a good idea.
To do so, it is possible to setup a slave as a writable slave, and
perform the intersection on the slave side, perhaps setting a TTL on the
resulting key so that it will expire after some time.
THE BUG
Problem: in order to have a consistent replication, expiring of keys in
Redis replication is up to the master, that synthesize DEL operations to
send in the replication stream. However slaves logically expire keys
by hiding them from read attempts from clients so that if the master did
not promptly sent a DEL, the client still see logically expired keys
as non existing.
Because slaves don't actively expire keys by actually evicting them but
just masking from the POV of read operations, if a key is created in a
writable slave, and an expire is set, the key will be leaked forever:
1. No DEL will be received from the master, which does not know about
such a key at all.
2. No eviction will be performed by the slave, since it needs to disable
eviction because it's up to masters, otherwise consistency of data is
lost.
THE FIX
In order to fix the problem, the slave should be able to tag keys that
were created in the slave side and have an expire set in some way.
My solution involved using an unique additional dictionary created by
the writable slave only if needed. The dictionary is obviously keyed by
the key name that we need to track: all the keys that are set with an
expire directly by a client writing to the slave are tracked.
The value in the dictionary is a bitmap of all the DBs where such a key
name need to be tracked, so that we can use a single dictionary to track
keys in all the DBs used by the slave (actually this limits the solution
to the first 64 DBs, but the default with Redis is to use 16 DBs).
This solution allows to pay both a small complexity and CPU penalty,
which is zero when the feature is not used, actually. The slave-side
eviction is encapsulated in code which is not coupled with the rest of
the Redis core, if not for the hook to track the keys.
TODO
I'm doing the first smoke tests to see if the feature works as expected:
so far so good. Unit tests should be added before merging into the
4.0 branch.
BACKGROUND AND USE CASEj
Redis slaves are normally write only, however the supprot a "writable"
mode which is very handy when scaling reads on slaves, that actually
need write operations in order to access data. For instance imagine
having slaves replicating certain Sets keys from the master. When
accessing the data on the slave, we want to peform intersections between
such Sets values. However we don't want to intersect each time: to cache
the intersection for some time often is a good idea.
To do so, it is possible to setup a slave as a writable slave, and
perform the intersection on the slave side, perhaps setting a TTL on the
resulting key so that it will expire after some time.
THE BUG
Problem: in order to have a consistent replication, expiring of keys in
Redis replication is up to the master, that synthesize DEL operations to
send in the replication stream. However slaves logically expire keys
by hiding them from read attempts from clients so that if the master did
not promptly sent a DEL, the client still see logically expired keys
as non existing.
Because slaves don't actively expire keys by actually evicting them but
just masking from the POV of read operations, if a key is created in a
writable slave, and an expire is set, the key will be leaked forever:
1. No DEL will be received from the master, which does not know about
such a key at all.
2. No eviction will be performed by the slave, since it needs to disable
eviction because it's up to masters, otherwise consistency of data is
lost.
THE FIX
In order to fix the problem, the slave should be able to tag keys that
were created in the slave side and have an expire set in some way.
My solution involved using an unique additional dictionary created by
the writable slave only if needed. The dictionary is obviously keyed by
the key name that we need to track: all the keys that are set with an
expire directly by a client writing to the slave are tracked.
The value in the dictionary is a bitmap of all the DBs where such a key
name need to be tracked, so that we can use a single dictionary to track
keys in all the DBs used by the slave (actually this limits the solution
to the first 64 DBs, but the default with Redis is to use 16 DBs).
This solution allows to pay both a small complexity and CPU penalty,
which is zero when the feature is not used, actually. The slave-side
eviction is encapsulated in code which is not coupled with the rest of
the Redis core, if not for the hook to track the keys.
TODO
I'm doing the first smoke tests to see if the feature works as expected:
so far so good. Unit tests should be added before merging into the
4.0 branch.
It was noted by @dvirsky that it is not possible to use string functions
when writing the AOF file. This sometimes is critical since the command
rewriting may need to be built in the context of the AOF callback, and
without access to the context, and the limited types that the AOF
production functions will accept, this can be an issue.
Moreover there are other needs that we can't anticipate regarding the
ability to use Redis Modules APIs using the context in order to build
representations to emit AOF / RDB.
Because of this a new API was added that allows the user to get a
temporary context from the IO context. The context is auto released
if obtained when the RDB / AOF callback returns.
Calling multiple time the function to get the context, always returns
the same one, since it is invalid to have more than a single context.
It was noted by @dvirsky that it is not possible to use string functions
when writing the AOF file. This sometimes is critical since the command
rewriting may need to be built in the context of the AOF callback, and
without access to the context, and the limited types that the AOF
production functions will accept, this can be an issue.
Moreover there are other needs that we can't anticipate regarding the
ability to use Redis Modules APIs using the context in order to build
representations to emit AOF / RDB.
Because of this a new API was added that allows the user to get a
temporary context from the IO context. The context is auto released
if obtained when the RDB / AOF callback returns.
Calling multiple time the function to get the context, always returns
the same one, since it is invalid to have more than a single context.
