HostDB

HostDB is a cache of DNS results. It is used to increase performance by aggregating address resolution across transactions. HostDB also stores state information for specific IP addresses.

Operation

The primary operation for HostDB is to resolve a fully qualified domain name (“FQDN”). As noted each FQDN is associated with a single record. Each record has an array of items. When a resolution request is made the database is checked to see if the record is already present. If so, it is served. Otherwise a DNS request is made. When the nameserver replies a record is created, added to the database, and then returned to the requestor.

Each info tracks several status values for its corresponding upstream. These are

• HTTP version

• Last failure time

The HTTP version is tracked from responses and provides a mechanism to make intelligent guesses about the protocol to use to the upstream.

The last failure time tracks when the last connection failure to the info occurred and doubles as a flag, where a value of TS_TIME_ZERO indicates a live target and any other value indicates a down info.

If an info is marked down (has a non-zero last failure time) there is a “fail window” during which no connections are permitted. After this time the info is considered to be a “zombie”. If all infos for a record are down then a specific error message is generated (body factory tag “connect#all_down”). Otherwise if the selected info is a zombie, a request is permitted but the zombie is immediately marked down again, preventing any additional requests until either the fail window has passed or the single connection succeeds. A successful connection clears the last file time and the info becomes alive.

Runtime Structure

DNS results are stored in a global hash table as instances of HostDBRecord. Each record stores the results of a single query. These records are not updated with new DNS results - instead a new record instance is created and replaces the previous instance in the table. The records are reference counted so such a replacement doesn’t invalidate the old record if the latter is still being accessed. Some specific dynamic data is migrated from the old record to the new one, such as the failure status of the upstreams in the record.

In each record is a variable length array of items, instances of HostDBInfo, one for each IP address in the record. This is called the “round robin” data for historical reasons. For SRV records there is an additional storage area in the record that is used to store the SRV names.

The round robin data is accessed by using an offset and count in the base record. For SRV records each record has an offset, relative to that HostDBInfo instance, for its own name in the name storage area.

State information for the outbound connection has been moved to a refurbished DNSInfo class named ResolveInfo. As much as possible relevant state information has been moved from the HttpSM to this structure. This is intended for future work where the state machine deals only with upstream transactions and not sessions.

ResolveInfo may contain a reference to a HostDB record, which preserves the record even if it is replaced due to DNS queries in other transactions. The record is not required as the resolution information can be supplied directly without DNS or HostDB, e.g. a plugin sets the upstream address explicitly. The resolved_p flag indicates if the current information is valid and ready to be used or not. A result of this is there is no longer a specific holder for API provided addresses - the interface now puts the address in the ResolveInfo and marks it as resolved. This prevents further DNS / HostDB lookups and the address is used as is.

The upstream port is a bit tricky and should be cleaned up. Currently value in srv_port determines the port if set. If not, then the port in addr is used.

Resolution Style

enum OS_Addr

Metadata about the source of the resolved address.’

enumerator TRY_DEFAULT

Use default resolution. This is the initial state.

enumerator TRY_HOSTDB

Use HostDB to resolve the target key.

enumerator TRY_CLIENT

Use the client supplied target address. This is used for transparent connections - the upstream address is obtained from the inbound connection. May fail over to HostDB.

enumerator USE_HOSTDB

Use HostDB to resolve the target key.

enumerator USE_CLIENT

Use the client supplied target address.

enumerator USE_API

Use the address provided via the plugin API.

The parallel values for using HostDB and the client target address are to control fail over on connection failure. The TRY_ values can fail over to another style, but the USE_ values cannot. This prevents cycles of style changes by having any TRY_ value fail over to a USE_ value, at which point it can no longer change. Note there is no TRY_API - if a plugin sets the upstream address that is locked in.

Issues

Currently if an upstream is marked down connections are still permitted, the only change is the number of retries. This has caused operational problems where down systems are flooded with requests which, despite the timeouts, accumulate in ATS until ATS runs out of memory (there were instances of over 800K pending transactions). This also made it hard to bring the upstreams back online. With these changes, requests to upstreams marked down are strongly rate limited and other transactions are immediately terminated with a 502 response, protecting both the upstream and ATS.

Future

There is still some work to be done in future PRs.

• The fail window and the zombie window should be separate values. It is quite reasonable to want to configure a very short fail window (possibly 0) with a moderately long zombie window so that probing connections can immediately start going upstream at a low rate.

• Failing an upstream should be more loosely connected to transactions. Currently there is a one to one relationship where failure is defined as the failure of a specific transaction to connect. There are situations where the number of connections attempts for mark a failure is should be larger than the number of retries for a single transaction. For transiently busy upstreams and low latency requests it can be reasonable to tune the per transaction timeout low with no retries but this then risks marking down upstreams that were merely a bit slow at a given moment.

• Parallel DNS requests should be supported. This is for both cross family requests and for split DNS.

• It would be nice to be able to do the probing connections to an upstream using synthetic requests instead of burning actual user requests. What would be needed is a handoff from ATS to the probe to indicate a particular upstream is considered down, at which point active health checks are done until the upstream is once again alive, at which point this is handed off back to ATS.

History

This version has several major architectural changes from the previous version.

• The data is split into records and info, not handled as a variant of a single data type. This provides a noticeable simplification of the code.

• Single and multiple address results are treated identically - a singleton is simply a multiple of size 1. This yields a major simplification of the implementation.

• Connections are throttled to upstreams marked down, allowing only a single connection attempt per fail window timing until a connection succeeds.

• Timing information is stored in std::chrono data types instead of proprietary types.

• State information has been promoted to atomics and updates are immediate rather than scheduled. This also means the data in the state machine is a reference to a shared object, not a local copy. The promotion was necessary to coordinate zombie connections to upstreams marked down across transactions.

• The “resolve key” is now a separate data object from the HTTP request. This is a subtle but major change. The effect is requests can be routed to different upstreams without changing the request. Parent selection can be greatly simplified as it become merely a matter of setting the resolve key, rather than having a completely different code path.