When a hostname resolves to multiple IP addresses and the first one
tried doesn't work, the socket for the second attempt may get dropped on
the floor, causing the request to eventually time out. The issue is that
when using kqueue (as on mac and bsd platforms) instead of select, the
kernel removes the first fd from kqueue when it is closed (in trynextip,
connect.c:503). Trynextip() then goes on to open a new socket, which
gets assigned the same number as the one it just closed. Later in
multi.c, socket_cb is not called because the fd is already in
multi->sockhash, so the new socket is never added to kqueue.
The correct fix is to ensure that socket_cb is called to remove the fd
when trynextip() closes the socket, and again to re-add it after
singleipsocket(). I'm not sure how to cleanly do that, but the attached
patch works around the problem in an admittedly kludgy way by delaying
the close to ensure that the newly-opened socket gets a different fd.
Daniel's added comment: I didn't spot a way to easily do a nicer fix so
I've proceeded with Ben's patch.
Bug: http://curl.haxx.se/bug/view.cgi?id=3017819
Patch by: Ben Darnell
HTTP Pipelining with libcurl
============================
Background
Since pipelining implies that one or more requests are sent to a server before
the previous response(s) have been received, we only support it for multi
interface use.
Considerations
When using the multi interface, you create one easy handle for each transfer.
Bascially any number of handles can be created, added and used with the multi
interface - simultaneously. It is an interface designed to allow many
simultaneous transfers while still using a single thread. Pipelining does not
change any of these details.
API
We've added a new option to curl_multi_setopt() called CURLMOPT_PIPELINING
that enables "attempted pipelining" and then all easy handles used on that
handle will attempt to use an existing pipeline.
Details
- A pipeline is only created if a previous connection exists to the same IP
address that the new request is being made to use.
- Pipelines are only supported for HTTP(S) as no other currently supported
protocol has features resemembling this, but we still name this feature
plain 'pipelining' to possibly one day support it for other protocols as
well.
- HTTP Pipelining is for GET and HEAD requests only.
- When a pipeline is in use, we must take precautions so that when used easy
handles (i.e those who still wait for a response) are removed from the multi
handle, we must deal with the outstanding response nicely.
- Explicitly asking for pipelining handle X and handle Y won't be supported.
It isn't easy for an app to do this association. The lib should probably
still resolve the second one properly to make sure that they actually _can_
be considered for pipelining. Also, asking for explicit pipelining on handle
X may be tricky when handle X get a closed connection.
- We need options to control max pipeline length, and probably how to behave
if we reach that limit. As was discussed on the list, it can probably be
made very complicated, so perhaps we can think of a way to pass all
variables involved to a callback and let the application decide how to act
in specific situations. Either way, these fancy options are only interesting
to work on when everything is working and we have working apps to test with.
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