To detect when the group (or the whole key) is destroyed to send an
error to the consumers blocked in such group is a problem, so we leave
the consumers listening, the sysadmin is free to create or destroy
groups assuming she/he knows what to do. However a client may be blocked
in a given consumer group, that is later destroyed. Then the stream
receives new elements. In that case there is no sane behavior to serve
the consumer... but to report an error about the group no longer
existing.
More about detecting this synchronously and why it is not done:
1. Normally we don't do that, we leave clients blocked for other data
types such as lists.
2. When we free a stream object there is no longer information about
what was the key it was associated with, so while destroying the
consumer groups we miss the info to unblock the clients in that moment.
3. Objects can be reclaimed in other threads where it is no longer safe
to do client operations.
When a client blocks for a consumer group, we don't know the actual ID
we want to be served: other clients blocked in the same consumer group
may be served first, so the consumer group latest delivered ID changes.
This was not handled correctly, all the clients in the consumer group
were unblocked without data but the first.
We unblocked the client too early, when the group name object was no
longer valid in client->bpop, so propagating XCLAIM later in
streamPropagateXCLAIM() deferenced a field already set to NULL.
Usually blocking operations make a lot of sense with multiple keys so
that we can listen to multiple queues (or whatever the app models) with
a single connection. However in the synchronous case it is more useful
to be able to ask for N elements. This is a change that I also wanted to
perform soon or later in the blocking list variant, but here it is more
natural since there is no reply type difference.
blockForKeys() was not freeing the allocation holding the ID when the
key was already found busy. Fortunately the unit test checked explicitly
for blocking multiple times for the same key (copying a regression in
the blocking lists tests), so the bug was detected by the Redis test leak
checker.
With lists we need to signal only on key creation, but streams can
provide data to clients listening at every new item added.
To make this slightly more efficient we now track different classes of
blocked clients to avoid signaling keys when there is nobody listening.
A typical case is when the stream is used as a time series DB and
accessed only by range with XRANGE.
