comparison mercurial/debugcommands.py @ 37288:9bfcbe4f4745

wireproto: add streams to frame-based protocol Previously, the frame-based protocol was just a series of frames, with each frame associated with a request ID. In order to scale the protocol, we'll want to enable the use of compression. While it is possible to enable compression at the socket/pipe level, this has its disadvantages. The big one is it undermines the point of frames being standalone, atomic units that can be read and written: if you add compression above the framing protocol, you are back to having a stream-based protocol as opposed to something frame-based. So in order to preserve frames, compression needs to occur at the frame payload level. Compressing each frame's payload individually will limit compression ratios because the window size of the compressor will be limited by the max frame size, which is 32-64kb as currently defined. It will also add CPU overhead, as it is more efficient for compressors to operate on fewer, larger blocks of data than more, smaller blocks. So compressing each frame independently is out. This means we need to compress each frame's payload as if it is part of a larger stream. The simplest approach is to have 1 stream per connection. This could certainly work. However, it has disadvantages (documented below). We could also have 1 stream per RPC/command invocation. (This is the model HTTP/2 goes with.) This also has disadvantages. The main disadvantage to one global stream is that it has the very real potential to create CPU bottlenecks doing compression. Networks are only getting faster and the performance of single CPU cores has been relatively flat. Newer compression formats like zstandard offer better CPU cycle efficiency than predecessors like zlib. But it still all too common to saturate your CPU with compression overhead long before you saturate the network pipe. The main disadvantage with streams per request is that you can't reap the benefits of the compression context for multiple requests. For example, if you send 1000 RPC requests (or HTTP/2 requests for that matter), the response to each would have its own compression context. The overall size of the raw responses would be larger because compression contexts wouldn't be able to reference data from another request or response. The approach for streams as implemented in this commit is to support N streams per connection and for streams to potentially span requests and responses. As explained by the added internals docs, this facilitates servers and clients delegating independent streams and compression to independent threads / CPU cores. This helps alleviate the CPU bottleneck of compression. This design also allows compression contexts to be reused across requests/responses. This can result in improved compression ratios and less overhead for compressors and decompressors having to build new contexts. Another feature that was defined was the ability for individual frames within a stream to declare whether that individual frame's payload uses the content encoding (read: compression) defined by the stream. The idea here is that some servers may serve data from a combination of caches and dynamic resolution. Data coming from caches may be pre-compressed. We want to facilitate servers being able to essentially stream bytes from caches to the wire with minimal overhead. Being able to mix and match with frames are compressed within a stream enables these types of advanced server functionality. This commit defines the new streams mechanism. Basic code for supporting streams in frames has been added. But that code is seriously lacking and doesn't fully conform to the defined protocol. For example, we don't close any streams. And support for content encoding within streams is not yet implemented. The change was rather invasive and I didn't think it would be reasonable to implement the entire feature in a single commit. For the record, I would have loved to reuse an existing multiplexing protocol to build the new wire protocol on top of. However, I couldn't find a protocol that offers the performance and scaling characteristics that I desired. Namely, it should support multiple compression contexts to facilitate scaling out to multiple CPU cores and compression contexts should be able to live longer than single RPC requests. HTTP/2 *almost* fits the bill. But the semantics of HTTP message exchange state that streams can only live for a single request-response. We /could/ tunnel on top of HTTP/2 streams and frames with HEADER and DATA frames. But there's no guarantee that HTTP/2 libraries and proxies would allow us to use HTTP/2 streams and frames without the HTTP message exchange semantics defined in RFC 7540 Section 8. Other RPC protocols like gRPC tunnel are built on top of HTTP/2 and thus preserve its semantics of stream per RPC invocation. Even QUIC does this. We could attempt to invent a higher-level stream that spans HTTP/2 streams. But this would be violating HTTP/2 because there is no guarantee that HTTP/2 streams are routed to the same server. The best we can do - which is what this protocol does - is shoehorn all request and response data into a single HTTP message and create streams within. At that point, we've defined a Content-Type in HTTP parlance. It just so happens our media type can also work as a standalone, stream-based protocol, without leaning on HTTP or similar protocol. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2907
author Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc@gmail.com>
date Mon, 26 Mar 2018 11:00:16 -0700
parents d4e62df1c73d
children cc5a040fe150
comparison
equal deleted inserted replaced
37287:3ed344546d9e 37288:9bfcbe4f4745
2775 2775
2776 It is possible to emit a *Unified Frame-Based Protocol* by using special 2776 It is possible to emit a *Unified Frame-Based Protocol* by using special
2777 syntax. 2777 syntax.
2778 2778
2779 A frame is composed as a type, flags, and payload. These can be parsed 2779 A frame is composed as a type, flags, and payload. These can be parsed
2780 from a string of the form ``<requestid> <type> <flags> <payload>``. That is, 2780 from a string of the form:
2781 4 space-delimited strings. 2781
2782 2782 <request-id> <stream-id> <stream-flags> <type> <flags> <payload>
2783 ``payload`` is the simplest: it is evaluated as a Python byte string 2783
2784 literal. 2784 ``request-id`` and ``stream-id`` are integers defining the request and
2785 2785 stream identifiers.
2786 ``requestid`` is an integer defining the request identifier.
2787 2786
2788 ``type`` can be an integer value for the frame type or the string name 2787 ``type`` can be an integer value for the frame type or the string name
2789 of the type. The strings are defined in ``wireprotoframing.py``. e.g. 2788 of the type. The strings are defined in ``wireprotoframing.py``. e.g.
2790 ``command-name``. 2789 ``command-name``.
2791 2790
2792 ``flags`` is a ``|`` delimited list of flag components. Each component 2791 ``stream-flags`` and ``flags`` are a ``|`` delimited list of flag
2793 (and there can be just one) can be an integer or a flag name for the 2792 components. Each component (and there can be just one) can be an integer
2794 specified frame type. Values are resolved to integers and then bitwise 2793 or a flag name for stream flags or frame flags, respectively. Values are
2795 OR'd together. 2794 resolved to integers and then bitwise OR'd together.
2795
2796 ``payload`` is is evaluated as a Python byte string literal.
2796 """ 2797 """
2797 opts = pycompat.byteskwargs(opts) 2798 opts = pycompat.byteskwargs(opts)
2798 2799
2799 if opts['localssh'] and not repo: 2800 if opts['localssh'] and not repo:
2800 raise error.Abort(_('--localssh requires a repository')) 2801 raise error.Abort(_('--localssh requires a repository'))