Life of a HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server

2014-10-06

When learning a new programming language, I tend to write two things with it: a language interpreter (usually a FORTH-like language or Brainfuck if I'm feeling lazy), and a HTTP server. Sometimes, just as a challenge or a way to quench my boredom, I do this even though I've been working with a particular language for some time, as is the case with C.

None of these projects I've written over the years have been as complex as Lwan ended up being: most of them were nothing but weekend hacks and were never able to hold my attention for more than a few dozen hours.

It's to be expected, then, that I might have a thing or two to say about it. In fact, I've been doing this in homeopathic doses over the almost two years since I've started the project. Never actually connected all the dots, leaving out important details.

This article is an attempt to describe, from the perspective of Lwan, the life of a HTTP request — from the socket being accepted to the response being sent — and explaining details and reasoning behind the implementation.

Creating the listening socket & accepting connections

There's nothing really special here: sockets are either created using the standard POSIX stuff, or are passed down from systemd. In either case, TCP Fastopen and Quickack are enabled, in addition to socket lingering. The socket is left in its default, blocking mode. The listen() backlog is the maximum allowed by the system.

static int _get_backlog_size ( void ) { #ifdef SOMAXCONN int backlog = SOMAXCONN ; #else int backlog = 128 ; #endif FILE * somaxconn ; somaxconn = fopen ( "/proc/sys/net/core/somaxconn" , "r" ); if ( somaxconn ) { int tmp ; if ( fscanf ( somaxconn , "%d" , & tmp ) == 1 ) backlog = tmp ; fclose ( somaxconn ); } return backlog ; }

It's a blocking file descriptor since the main thread (responsible for accepting all the sockets and scheduling clients) blocks on a call to accept4() instead of something like Epoll. This accept() variant is Linux-only and, among other things, lets one specify flags in sockets without requiring an additional round trip to the kernel; the only flag that interests Lwan is SOCK_NONBLOCK .

void lwan_main_loop ( lwan_t * l ) { if ( setjmp ( cleanup_jmp_buf )) return ; signal ( SIGINT , _signal_handler ); lwan_status_info ( "Ready to serve" ); for (;;) { int client_fd = accept4 ( l -> main_socket , NULL , NULL , SOCK_NONBLOCK ); if ( UNLIKELY ( client_fd < 0 )) { lwan_status_perror ( "accept" ); continue ; } _schedule_client ( l , client_fd ); } }

File descriptor limits are raised to the maximum allowed by system settings — at which time, Lwan pre-allocates an array of structures to hold connection state for all possible file descriptors.

Scheduling connection

In order to multiplex connections, Lwan spawns one thread per logical CPU, and uses Epoll to determine which socket is ready to be written to or read from. Once a connection is scheduled to one of these threads, it stays there until it is explicitly closed or a timeout occurs.

All threads share the preallocated connection array, and there are no explicit locks. The index to this array is the connection file descriptor, which makes lookup very quick. This exploits the notion that file descriptors are always allocated from the lowest possible number.

struct lwan_connection_t_ { /* This structure is exactly 32-bytes on x86-64. If it is * changed, make sure the scheduler (lwan.c) is updated as * well. */ lwan_connection_flags_t flags ; unsigned int time_to_die ; /* In seconds since DQ epoch */ coro_t * coro ; lwan_thread_t * thread ; int prev , next ; /* For death queue */ };

Since this structure is quite small, this leads to a form of implicit lock called false sharing, which is solved with a scheduler that is aware of that problem and groups two connection structures per cache line. It's simpler than it sounds:

int thread = (( fd - 1 ) / 2 ) % n_threads ;

A round robin scheduler is used on other architectures.

An interesting curiosity about the connection structure is that it doesn't store the file descriptor: pointer arithmetic is performed to obtain it, as the the base address for the connection array is known.

ALWAYS_INLINE int lwan_connection_get_fd ( lwan_connection_t * conn ) { return ( int )( ptrdiff_t )( conn - conn -> thread -> lwan -> conns ); }

After a thread has been chosen by the scheduler, the file descriptor number is sent to a Unix domain socket created with socketpair() to that particular thread's Epoll. This part used to use epoll_ctl() directly — which, although threadsafe, had a problem: epoll_wait() will never timeout on a socket if nothing was read from it previously. By writing to that socketpair, Epoll awakens, the file descriptor is added to it, and that thread's death queue can handle the timeout by itself.

The sole purpose of each thread is to react to Epoll events, such as:

Timeouts (in which case the death queue iterates, potentially terminating connections);

Epoll errors (in which case the thread finishes gracefully);

Readiness events (can read, can write);

Connection hung up.

Epoll events are used as signals to create, destroy, resume, and reset coroutines: there's one for each connection, and they're used both as lightweight threads and as resource management facilities.

Coroutines

Coroutines provides a reasonably simple model for asynchronous I/O handling that’s less convoluted than the dreaded callback idiom prevalent in C. They also require a lot less stack space than a thread and their creation is pretty efficient: essentially just a call to malloc() .

coro_t * coro_new ( coro_switcher_t * switcher , coro_function_t function , void * data ) { coro_t * coro = malloc ( sizeof ( * coro ) + CORO_STACK_MIN ); if ( ! coro ) return NULL ; coro -> switcher = switcher ; coro -> defer = NULL ; /* coro_reset() is just a few assignments on x86-64 */ coro_reset ( coro , function , data ); #if !defined(NDEBUG) && defined(USE_VALGRIND) char * stack = ( char * )( coro + 1 ); coro -> vg_stack_id = VALGRIND_STACK_REGISTER ( stack , stack + CORO_STACK_MIN ); #endif return coro ; }

Request handlers can be written using an API that’s completely synchronous on the surface but behind the curtains, I/O happens in the background (client sockets are non-blocking) and control is given to the next coroutine as commanded by each thread's loop.

Execution resumes where the coroutine left off. This saves a lot of code, not only making things easier to reason about, but also simplifying resource management by having a single cleanup point.

To provide a synchronous-looking API, Lwan provides a few wrappers for common operations, such as writev() or sendfile(). Unlike the functions these wrap, they return no error:

On success, the same return code is returned;

Recoverable errors (such as EINTR ) are handled by trying them again a few times before giving up;

) are handled by trying them again a few times before giving up; When giving up, or on unrecoverable errors, coroutines are aborted.

int lwan_openat ( lwan_request_t * request , int dirfd , const char * pathname , int flags ) { for ( int tries = max_failed_tries ; tries ; tries -- ) { int fd = openat ( dirfd , pathname , flags ); if ( LIKELY ( fd >= 0 )) { /* * close() will be called as soon as the * coroutine ends */ coro_defer ( request -> conn -> coro , CORO_DEFER ( close ), ( void * )( intptr_t ) fd ); return fd ; } switch ( errno ) { case EINTR : case EMFILE : case ENFILE : case ENOMEM : coro_yield ( request -> conn -> coro , CONN_CORO_MAY_RESUME ); break ; default : return - errno ; } } return - ENFILE ; }

When a coroutine is destroyed, user-defined callbacks are executed. These include callbacks set by the wrapper functions, to close files, free memory, and perform many other cleanup tasks. This ensures resources are released regardless if the coroutine ended normally or an unrecoverable error has been detected.

On supported architectures, coroutine context switching is almost as cheap as a function call. This is possible because hand-written assembly routines are used, which only performs the essential register exchange, as mandated by the ABI. There is still some work to do in order to speed up this; tricks used by libco, for instance, might be used in the future to reduce some of the overhead.

On every other architecture, swapcontext() is used and this usually incurs in saving and restoring the signal mask, in addition to swapping every register (including those not required by the calling convention); this might change to setjmp() in the future to avoid at least the two system calls.

Another use for coroutines in Lwan is inside the Mustache templating engine, described in more depth below.

Reading requests

The loop within each I/O thread is quite crude.

Essentially, a coroutine will only be resumed for reading once per request: once it yields, Epoll will only be interested in write events. Because of this, reading a request uses a purpose-built read() wrapper that tricks the scheduler to still be interested in read events, unless the request has been fully received (by ending with the “␍␊␍␊” separator).

As soon as the whole request has been received, it is then parsed and acted upon.

Parsing request

Request parsing in Lwan is quite efficient: there are no copies, no memory allocations from the heap. The buffer is modified in place by slicing and storing pointers to stuff the server might be interested in. Parsing of HTTP request headers is delayed until needed (and they might not be needed).

struct lwan_request_parse_t_ { lwan_value_t buffer ; /* The whole buffer */ lwan_value_t query_string ; /* Stuff after URLs ? */ lwan_value_t if_modified_since ; /* If-Modified-Since: */ lwan_value_t range ; /* Range: */ lwan_value_t accept_encoding ; /* Accept-Encoding: */ lwan_value_t fragment ; /* Stuff after URLs # */ lwan_value_t content_length ; /* Content-Length: */ lwan_value_t post_data ; /* POST data */ lwan_value_t content_type ; /* Content-Type: */ lwan_value_t authorization ; /* Authorization: */ char connection ; /* k=keep-alive, c=close */ };

Among other things, one that often receives comments is how headers are parsed. Two tricks are involved: avoiding spilling/filling registers to compare strings with strncmp() , and applying a heuristic to avoid reading (and comparing) more than necessary. Both tricks are intertwined into a “string prefix switch”:

Four bytes are read from memory, and are cast to a 32-bit integer pointer;

That pointer is then dereferenced;

A standard switch statement is used to perform cheap comparisons on a 32-bit integer;

When a header prefix is matched, a simple heuristic of finding the separating colon and space character where they’re supposed to be is used. This might give false positives, although that’s very unlikely in practice.



Once the request has been parsed, it is time to look up what is going to handle it.

Looking up handler

A prefix tree is used to look up handlers. It is a modified trie data structure that has only eight pointers per node, so that on x86-64, each node fills one cache line exactly. This is achieved by hashing each character used to build up a node by taking the 3 least significant bits.

struct lwan_trie_node_t_ { lwan_trie_node_t * next [ 8 ]; lwan_trie_leaf_t * leaf ; int ref_count ; };

The canonical and naïve alternative to the hashed trie is having 256 pointers per node, which puts too much virtual memory pressure: the approach used in Lwan is a good compromise between keeping this pressure low and implementation complexity.

Another alternative (which might be considered in the future) is to reduce the amount of nodes by coalescing common prefixes; this significantly increases implementation complexity, though, but combined with the string switch trick, this might yield a good performance boost.

Yet another technique investigated was to generate machine code to perform lookup: essentially turning a data structure into executable code. The idea works but the instruction cache pressure isn't worth the trouble. I'm still partial to this solution, though, so I might revisit it later: Varnish does something remotely similar with VCL and it seems to work, so this deserves a little bit more research.

After a handler is found, a second round of parsing might happen. Each handler contains a set of flags that signal if headers (which were sliced in the request parsing stage) should be actually parsed. This include headers such as Range, Accept-Encoding, If-Modified-Since, and authorization stuff. Handlers that do not require parsing these headers will not trigger potentially expensive string crunching.

typedef enum { HANDLER_PARSE_QUERY_STRING = 1 << 0 , HANDLER_PARSE_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE = 1 << 1 , HANDLER_PARSE_RANGE = 1 << 2 , HANDLER_PARSE_ACCEPT_ENCODING = 1 << 3 , HANDLER_PARSE_POST_DATA = 1 << 4 , HANDLER_MUST_AUTHORIZE = 1 << 5 , HANDLER_REMOVE_LEADING_SLASH = 1 << 6 , HANDLER_PARSE_MASK = 1 << 0 | 1 << 1 | 1 << 2 | 1 << 3 | 1 << 4 } lwan_handler_flags_t ;

To reduce the amount of boilerplate necessary to declare a handler, there’s a shortcut that parses almost everything; these are the “request handlers”, such as the “Hello world handler” example shown below.

Modules, on the other hand, provide much more fine-grained control of how the request will be handled; an example is the static file serving feature, also discussed further down.

static const lwan_module_t serve_files = { . name = "serve_files" , . init = serve_files_init , . init_from_hash = serve_files_init_from_hash , . shutdown = serve_files_shutdown , . handle = serve_files_handle_cb , . flags = HANDLER_REMOVE_LEADING_SLASH | HANDLER_PARSE_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE | HANDLER_PARSE_RANGE | HANDLER_PARSE_ACCEPT_ENCODING };

Hello world handler

The simplest handler possible is a “Hello, World!“. This tests the raw read-parse-write capacity of Lwan, without requiring more system calls than absolutely necessary.

lwan_http_status_t hello_world ( lwan_request_t * request __attribute__ (( unused )), lwan_response_t * response , void * data __attribute__ (( unused ))) { static const char * hello_world = "Hello, world!" ; response -> mime_type = "text/plain" ; strbuf_set_static ( response -> buffer , hello_world , strlen ( hello_world )); return HTTP_OK ; }

These simple handlers will use whatever is inside their respective string buffers (which is an array that grows automatically when needed, with some bookkeeping attached). In the “Hello, World!” case, however, the string buffer acts merely as a pointer to some read-only string stored in the text section; this simplifies the interface a little bit, while avoiding string copies and unneeded heap allocations.

Chunked encoding and Server-sent events

Supported also is the Chunked Encoding. Using it is very simple: just set the response MIME Type, fill the string buffer, and call lwan_response_send_chunk() . From this point on, the response headers will be sent alongside the first chunk, the string buffer will be cleared, and the coroutine will yield. To send the next chunk, just fill the string buffer again and send another chunk, until your handler is complete.

lwan_http_status_t test_chunked_encoding ( lwan_request_t * request , lwan_response_t * response , void * data __attribute__ (( unused ))) { response -> mime_type = "text/plain" ; strbuf_printf ( response -> buffer , "First chunk

" ); lwan_response_send_chunk ( request ); for ( int i = 0 ; i <= 10 ; i ++ ) { strbuf_printf ( response -> buffer , "*Chunk #%d*

" , i ); lwan_response_send_chunk ( request ); } strbuf_printf ( response -> buffer , "Last chunk

" ); lwan_response_send_chunk ( request ); return HTTP_OK ; }

The same general idea is used by Server-sent events; however, one uses lwan_response_send_event() , and passes the event name as well.

lwan_http_status_t test_server_sent_event ( lwan_request_t * request , lwan_response_t * response , void * data __attribute__ (( unused ))) { for ( int i = 0 ; i <= 10 ; i ++ ) { strbuf_printf ( response -> buffer , "{n: %d}" , i ); lwan_response_send_event ( request , "currval" ); } return HTTP_OK ; }

The implementation inside Lwan is as straightforward as it looks: coroutines saved the day.

File serving module

Since files can be served using the sendfile() system call, the kind of handlers used by Hello World can't be used: responses are sent using writev() to send both response headers and contents in one kernel roundtrip. Because of this, there's a different kind of handler that gives more control as to how the response is sent: the (for the lack of a better name) streaming handlers. Streaming handlers are expected to send the whole response themselves.

To convert a "normal" handler into a streaming handler is simple: just set a few pointers in the “normal” handler and return. With the exception of producing error responses automatically — streaming handlers function exactly the same as a "normal" handler that does not send the response headers automatically.

static lwan_http_status_t serve_files_handle_cb ( lwan_request_t * request , lwan_response_t * response , void * data ) { lwan_http_status_t return_status = HTTP_NOT_FOUND ; serve_files_priv_t * priv = data ; struct cache_entry_t * ce ; if ( UNLIKELY ( ! priv )) { return_status = HTTP_INTERNAL_ERROR ; goto fail ; } ce = cache_coro_get_and_ref_entry ( priv -> cache , request -> conn -> coro , request -> url . value ); if ( LIKELY ( ce )) { file_cache_entry_t * fce = ( file_cache_entry_t * ) ce ; response -> mime_type = fce -> mime_type ; response -> stream . callback = fce -> funcs -> serve ; response -> stream . data = ce ; response -> stream . priv = priv ; return HTTP_OK ; } fail : response -> stream . callback = NULL ; return return_status ; }

To avoid having to obtain information about a file for every request, this information is cached for a few seconds. The caching mechanism itself is discussed in detail further down.

While caching file information, the file size is considered while picking the way to serve it. Files larger than 16KiB are served with sendfile() to allow zero (or fewer) copy transfers, and smaller files are mapped in memory using mmap() .

static const cache_funcs_t * _get_funcs ( serve_files_priv_t * priv , const char * key , char * full_path , struct stat * st ) { char index_html_path_buf [ PATH_MAX ]; char * index_html_path = index_html_path_buf ; if ( S_ISDIR ( st -> st_mode )) { /* It is a directory. It might be the root directory * (empty key), or something else. In either case, * tack priv->index_html to the path. */ if ( * key == '\0' ) { index_html_path = ( char * ) priv -> index_html ; } else { /* Redirect /path to /path/. This is to help * cases where there's something like <img * src="../foo.png">, so that actually * /path/../foo.png is served instead of * /path../foo.png. */ const char * key_end = rawmemchr ( key , '\0' ); if ( * ( key_end - 1 ) != '/' ) return & redir_funcs ; if ( UNLIKELY ( snprintf ( index_html_path , PATH_MAX , "%s%s" , key , priv -> index_html ) < 0 )) return NULL ; } /* See if it exists. */ if ( fstatat ( priv -> root . fd , index_html_path , st , 0 ) < 0 ) { if ( UNLIKELY ( errno != ENOENT )) return NULL ; /* If it doesn't, generate a directory list. */ return & dirlist_funcs ; } /* If it does, we want its full path. */ if ( UNLIKELY ( priv -> root . path_len + 1 /* slash */ + strlen ( index_html_path ) + 1 >= PATH_MAX )) return NULL ; full_path [ priv -> root . path_len ] = '/' ; strncpy ( full_path + priv -> root . path_len + 1 , index_html_path , PATH_MAX - priv -> root . path_len - 1 ); } /* It's not a directory: choose the fastest way to serve the * file judging by its size. */ if ( st -> st_size < 16384 ) return & mmap_funcs ; return & sendfile_funcs ; }

Small files may also be compressed, unless compressed data ends up being larger than the original data. Especially if the response header is considered. Because of this, small files are only compressed if it’s worth the trouble. The 16KiB threshold has been chosen empirically: larger values did not yield substantial performance gains compared to using sendfile() .

static void _compress_cached_entry ( mmap_cache_data_t * md ) { static const size_t deflated_header_size = sizeof ( "Content-Encoding: deflate" ); md -> compressed . size = compressBound ( md -> uncompressed . size ); md -> compressed . contents = malloc ( md -> compressed . size ); if ( UNLIKELY ( ! md -> compressed . contents )) goto error_zero_out ; int ret = compress ( md -> compressed . contents , & md -> compressed . size , md -> uncompressed . contents , md -> uncompressed . size ) if ( UNLIKELY ( ret != Z_OK )) goto error_free_compressed ; size_t total_size = md -> compressed . size + deflated_header_size ; if ( total_size < md -> uncompressed . size ) return ; error_free_compressed : free ( md -> compressed . contents ); md -> compressed . contents = NULL ; error_zero_out : md -> compressed . size = 0 ; }

For directories, the template engine is used to create the listing. The contents are cached using the same mechanism files are. Templating is discussed below.

An interesting optimization is that, to obtain the full path, a special version of realpath(), forked from the GNU libc implementation, is used. This version uses the lighter “-at()” variants of system calls that operates on paths; they do not need to perform path-to-inode conversion for the whole path, only from a path pointed to by a directory file descriptor.

The file server is a module. It is a simple way to keep per instance state, such as the file descriptor for the root directory, the directory list template, and a few other things.

Mustache templating engine

Not all features from Mustache are implemented: some are pretty much only practical if using a language that’s more expressive than C. However, without requiring (too much) boilerplate, a substantial amount of its specification is implemented, in a pretty efficient way, and suits all Lwan uses pretty well. (Being performant might not matter, though, but I'm here to have fun, not solve problems.)

Not everything is implemented exactly as in the standard, though: that’s mostly for laziness reasons, but the non-dynamic nature of C would make certain things needlessly difficult to implement and use, anyway. The templating engine supports the basic stuff. In no particular order:

Variables of different types;

Checking the emptiness of variables;

Iteration on lists (and any kind of sequences);

Partials;

Comments;

Inverted sections.

Setting the delimiters, triple mustaches (for escaping HTML output), ampersand to unescape strings — and possibly other things — are not implemented, but could be implemented with relatively minimal effort. String escaping is supported by using a special string type and should conform to best practices.

Templates are pre-processed. This pre-processing step uses a state machine parser to break down its text representation into a series of actions that can be performed by the engine very efficiently. Actions include things like “append string”, “append variable”, “start iteration”, and so on.

typedef enum { TPL_ACTION_APPEND , TPL_ACTION_APPEND_CHAR , TPL_ACTION_VARIABLE , TPL_ACTION_LIST_START_ITER , TPL_ACTION_LIST_END_ITER , TPL_ACTION_IF_VARIABLE_NOT_EMPTY , TPL_ACTION_END_IF_VARIABLE_NOT_EMPTY , TPL_ACTION_APPLY_TPL , TPL_ACTION_LAST } lwan_tpl_action_t ;

For instance, a stack of hash tables is used during this pre-processing step to act as a symbol table; this table can be thrown away as soon as the pre-processing step is complete, as all variables have been resolved and a much more efficient value lookup mechanism can be used instead.

Obtaining variables

To use the templating mechanism, one should have a structure for each template. Structures are cheap and provide some welcome compile-time type checking that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

typedef struct hello_t { char * name ; int age ; };

In addition to a structure, due to the lack of introspection in C, an array of variable descriptors should be declared. A variable descriptor contains a string representation of a variable name, the offset in bytes of that variable within the structure, and pointers to functions to test the emptiness of that kind of variable and to append the variable to the string buffer; macros help alleviate boilerplate headaches.

lwan_var_descriptor_t hello_descriptor [] = { TPL_VAR_STR ( hello_t , name ), TPL_VAR_INT ( hello_t , age ), TPL_VAR_SENTINEL }; lwan_tpl_t * hello = lwan_tpl_compile ( "hello.tpl" , hello_descriptor );

A structure containing all the variables can then be supplied by some sort of database layer, caching layer, or be declared on the spot: compound literals with designated initializers make this use case pretty straightforward.

strbuf_t * rendered = lwan_tpl_render ( hello , ( hello_t []) {{ . name = "World" , . age = 42 }}); /* Do something with `rendered` */ strbuf_free ( rendered );

Appending a variable is then just the matter of calling the appropriate callback function (conveniently in the descriptor), passing the base address of that structure plus the byte offset within it.

static void append_var_to_strbuf ( lwan_tpl_chunk_t * chunk , void * variables , strbuf_t * buf ) { lwan_var_descriptor_t * descriptor = chunk -> data ; if ( LIKELY ( descriptor )) descriptor -> append_to_strbuf ( buf , ( char * ) variables + descriptor -> offset ); }

Sequences

To avoid creating potentially lots of small, temporary objects, for lists and sequences a coroutine is created and is used as a makeshift generator function. Another option was to implement iterators using a structure to hold state plus a few callbacks — I gave up while imagining the amount of boilerplate necessary. A function is simple to write on the other hand, and can include initialization, iteration, and cleanup.

The only user of sequences in templates within Lwan is the file listing feature in the file serving module. The generator function is pretty straightforward, and is responsible for opening the directory, obtaining information for each entry, and then closing the directory. A shorter version of it is described in the original blog post about sequences in the templating engine.

Caching

I’ve used and implemented a few caching infrastructures over the years, and I believe that the one in Lwan is, so far, the simplest one I’ve used. Most caches will require items to be created — and then added manually to the cache. Not only clumsy, but could also lead to race conditions.

The one in Lwan knows how to create and destroy a cache entry: one just asks the cache to obtain a value for a given key. If it’s not there, the entry is created and returned. The lifetime of a cache entry is controlled automatically, and a low priority thread kicks in every now and then to prune old entries.

struct cache_t { struct { struct hash * table ; pthread_rwlock_t lock ; } hash ; struct { struct list_head list ; pthread_rwlock_t lock ; } queue ; struct { CreateEntryCallback create_entry ; DestroyEntryCallback destroy_entry ; void * context ; } cb ; struct { time_t time_to_live ; clockid_t clock_id ; } settings ; unsigned flags ; #ifndef NDEBUG struct { unsigned hits ; unsigned misses ; unsigned evicted ; } stats ; #endif };

Unlike most caches, the one in Lwan isn’t limited by size: items stay in the cache for a predetermined amount of time.

Cache entries are reference-counted, and they’re not automatically reaped if something is holding on a reference: these items are marked as floating when this happens, and the last one to give up the reference will also destroy the entry.

struct cache_entry_t { struct list_node entries ; char * key ; unsigned refs ; unsigned flags ; struct timespec time_to_die ; }; struct file_cache_entry_t_ { struct cache_entry_t base ; struct { char string [ 31 ]; time_t integer ; } last_modified ; const char * mime_type ; const cache_funcs_t * funcs ; };

When used within a coroutine, two things can happen: ➀ the coroutine might yield if the cache lock were to become contended and ➁ automatically releasing a reference when a coroutine is destroyed.

In addition to floating entries, there are also temporary entries. The cache uses read-write locks, but most of the time, locks are only obtained using the “trylock” primitive: if a lock can’t be obtained for a reason, Lwan tries to move on to something else. This could be attending to another request (by yielding the coroutine), or merely returning an off-the-books entry that will be destroyed as soon as its sole user releases its reference. The difference to floating entries is merely an implementation detail, so that an atomic decrement (and its accompanying memory barrier) isn’t used.

The cache tries to avoid keeping the locks locked. As an example, while an item is being created, no locks are held. This can, of course, lead to multiple entries being created concurrently, but if caching would be useful anyway, having a few temporary entries lying around isn’t a problem, as at least one will be cached for future access.

As nice as the cache subsystem ended up being, there is a lot of room for improvement. Reducing the amount of concurrent reference counting is high on the list. Reducing the latency is also in consideration. Making HTTP responses cacheable without special code in the handler is there as well.

Keep-alive connections, death queue

Connection lifetime is managed by a per-thread queue.

Each time a connection is scheduled to a certain thread, it is pushed to the queue, and a time to die is set. When there are connections in this queue, Epoll will timeout every second to iterate through it and kill connections when their time has come. Timeouts are infinite when the queue is empty, to avoid waking the process unnecessarily. Every time a coroutine is resumed, the time to die is updated, and the connection is pushed to the end of the queue.

Each death queue has its own epoch, which starts at zero and increments at every timeout. Whenever the last connection is removed from a queue, the epoch restarts. Keeping the epoch a small number will help shave a few bytes from each connection in the future.

struct death_queue_t { lwan_connection_t * conns ; lwan_connection_t head ; unsigned time ; unsigned short keep_alive_timeout ; };

The same timeout value is used for keep-alive connections and coroutines. This ensures coroutines will not linger indefinitely when not performing any kind of work.

The death queue is so important that almost a third of the connection structure is dedicated to its existence. Three integers keep state for the death queue: the time to die (as an unsigned int), and two integers as pointers to a doubly linked list.

Integers were used instead of pointers in order to save memory. This was possible since in reality they are indices to the connection array. A doubly linked list was also chosen since removing a connection from the middle of the queue should be efficient, as it is done very frequently to move the entry to the end. The list is also circular, in order to avoid branching to handle empty queue cases. Maintaining the queue inline with the connection structures help reducing cache pressure.

static inline int _death_queue_node_to_idx ( struct death_queue_t * dq , lwan_connection_t * conn ) { return ( conn == & dq -> head ) ? - 1 : ( int )( ptrdiff_t )( conn - dq -> conns ); } static inline lwan_connection_t * _death_queue_idx_to_node ( struct death_queue_t * dq , int idx ) { return ( idx < 0 ) ? & dq -> head : & dq -> conns [ idx ]; } static void _death_queue_insert ( struct death_queue_t * dq , lwan_connection_t * new_node ) { new_node -> next = - 1 ; new_node -> prev = dq -> head . prev ; lwan_connection_t * prev = _death_queue_idx_to_node ( dq , dq -> head . prev ); dq -> head . prev = prev -> next = _death_queue_node_to_idx ( dq , new_node ); } static void _death_queue_remove ( struct death_queue_t * dq , lwan_connection_t * node ) { lwan_connection_t * prev = _death_queue_idx_to_node ( dq , node -> prev ); lwan_connection_t * next = _death_queue_idx_to_node ( dq , node -> next ); next -> prev = node -> prev ; prev -> next = node -> next ; }

Closing words

That's pretty much it: when a response has been sent, the connection can either be closed, or a new request can be serviced in the same connection. Repeat ad infinitum and there's the HTTP server.

If you've made this far, I invite you to take a look at the full source code. There are things that were not mentioned in this article. It's also a young Free Software project with no entry barrier: just fork and issue a pull request.