when I came up with this idea weren't strong enough to help me see it
through. If this was a self-contained application and I had complete
control over what data got sent through what socket and when, I might
be able to get everything to work right without blocking, but instead
I have RPC/XDR in between me and the socket layer, and they have their
own ideas about what to do.
Maybe one day I'll go totally mad and figure out the right way to do
this; in the meantime this mess goes on the back burner.
_without_ using fork().
The problem with YPPROC_ALL is that it transmits an entire map through
a TCP pipe as the result of a single RPC call. First of all, this requires
certain hackery in the XDR filter. Second, if the map being sent is
large, the server can end up spending lots of time in the XDR filter
sending to just the one client, while requests for other clients will
go unanswered.
My original solution for this was to fork() the request into a child
process which terminates after the map has been transmitted (or the
transfer is interrupted due to an error). This leaves the parent free
to handle other requests. But this solution is kind of lame: fork()
is relatively expensive, and we have to keep a cap on the number of
child processes to keep from swamping the system.
What we do now is grab control of the service transport handle and XDR
handle from the RPC library and send the records one at a time ourselves
instead of letting the RPC library do it. We send a record, then go
back to the svc_run() loop and select() on the socket. If select() says
we can still write data, we send the next record. Then we call
svc_getreqset() and handle other RPCs and loop around again. This way,
we can handle other RPCs between records.
We manage multiple YPPROC_ALL requests using a circular queue. When a
request is done, we dequeue it and destroy the handle. We also tag
each request with a ttl which is decremented whevever we run the queue
and a handle isn't serviced. This lets us nuke requests that have sat
idle for too long (if we didn't do this, we might run out of socket
descriptors.)
Now all I have to do is come up with an async resolver, and ypserv
won't need to fork() at all. :)
Note: these changes should not go into 2.2 unless they get a very
throrough shakedown before the final cutoff date.
yp_dblookup.c:
- Implement database handle caching. What this means is that instead
of opening and closing map databases for each request, we open a
database and save the handle (and, if requested, the key index)
in an array. This saves a bit of overhead on things like repeated
YPPROC_NEXT calls, such as you'd get from getpwent(). Normally,
each YPPROC_NEXT would require open()ing the database, seeking
to the location supplied by the caller (which is time consuming with
hash databases as the R_CURSOR flag doesn't work), reading the
data, close()ing the database and then shipping the data off to
the caller. The system call overhead is prohibitive, especially
with very large maps. By caching the handle to an open database,
we elimitate at least the open()/close() system calls, as well
as the associated DB setup and tear-down operations, for a large
percentage of the time. This improves performance substantially at
the cost of consuming a little more memory than before.
Note that all the caching support is surrounded by #ifdef DB_CACHE
so that this same source module can still be used by other programs
that don't need it.
- Make yp_open_db() call yp_validdomain(). Doing it here saves cycles
when caching is enabled since a hit on the map cache list by
definition means that the domain being referenced is valid.
- Also make yp_open_db() check for exhaustion of file descriptors,
just in case.
yp_server.c:
- Reorganize things a little to take advantage of the database
handle caching. Add a call to yp_flush_all() in ypproc_clear_2_svc().
- Remove calls to yp_validdomain() from some of the service procedures.
yp_validdomain() is called inside yp_open_db() now, so procedures that
call into the database package don't need to use yp_validdomain()
themselves.
- Fix a bogosity in ypproc_maplist_2_svc(): don't summarily initiallize
the result.maps pointer to NULL. This causes yp_maplist_free()
to fail and leaks memory.
- Make ypproc_master_2_svc() copy the string it gets from the database
package into a private static buffer before trying to NUL terminate it.
This is necessary with the DB handle caching: stuffing a NUL into the
data returned by DB package will goof it up internally.
yp_main.c:
- Stuff for DB handle caching: call yp_init_dbs() to clear the
handle array and add call to yp_flush_all() to the SIGHUP
signal handler.
Makefile.yp:
- Reorganize to deal with database caching. yp_mkdb(8) can now be used
to send a YPPROC_CLEAR signal to ypserv(8). Call it after each map
is created to refresh ypserv's cache.
- Add support for mail.alias map.
Contributed by Mike Murphy (mrm@sceard.com).
- Make default location for the netgroups source file be /var/yp/netgroup
instead of /etc/netgroup.
mkaliases:
- New file: script to generate mail.alias map.
Contributed by Mike Murphy (mrm@sceard.com).
Makefile:
- Install Makefile.yp as /var/yp/Makefile.dist and link it to
/var/yp/Makefile only if /var/yp/Makefile doesn't already exist.
Suggested by Peter Wemm.
- Install new mkaliases script in /usr/libexec along with mknetid.
- Use somewhat saner approach to generating rpcgen-dependent files
as suggested by Garrett Wollman.
- Add a ypxfr_callback() function that we can use to signal failure to
yppush(8) in the event that we can't fork()/exec() ypxfr(8). yppush
only checks the return status from YPPROC_XFR enough to determine
that the RPC succeded: it relies on its callback service to figure
out whether or not the transfer actually worked.
- Give yp_dblookup.c its own debug variable (ypdb_debug) so that DB
access debugging messages can be turned on or off independent of the
program's global debug messages.
- Have the Makefile rpcgen the ypushresp_xfr_1() client stub for us and
nuke the unneeded rule for yp_xdr.c that I left in by mistake (the XDR
filters live in libc now).
equivalent to the old ypserv, except that it doesn't support the
-p [port] option to force the server to use a particular port.
The server stubs and yp.h header file are auto-generated from the yp.x
protocol definition file. The auto-generated XDR routines in libc/yp
are also used. The database access code has been broken out into a
seperate module so that other NIS utilities (ypxfr in particular)
can use it.
Note that the old mknetid script is being temporarily moved here; it
will be replaced by an mknetid program which will eventually have
a home under /usr/src/libexec. (The existing script is actually
somewhat broken -- it doesn't handle hosts -- but this isn't a big
deal at this point since the netid.byname map is really only useful
fopr Secure RPC, which we don't have yet.)
