On 17/10/16 19:41, Gonzalo Diethelm wrote:
First post, libuv newbie.
Hi and welcome to libuv then!
I am trying to understand how a multi-threaded web server would fit in the libuv design. This is how I envision it, but I have some questions. The main thread would run the HTTP accept loop, and I would expect each connection request to be handled to a worker in the thread pool. Each thread in the worker pool will also be doing I/O (think running a query against MySQL), and will somehow pass the results back to the main thread. After reading a bit here and there, I would think this is one way to do this with libuv: 1. Main thread runs default loop and handles all the HTTP traffic. Whenever it gets an HTTP request, it puts it in a thread-safe queue and does a notify_all to awake one random thread in the pool; all of these threads would be waiting on the queue. 2. One worker thread awakes, dequeues pending work from the queue and runs it. I guess each thread has its own libuv loop, to handle the I/O needed to go to MySQL / read a file / etc.
If each thread is a uv loop, then you could send the connection where the request came from from one loop to another using uv_write2. That way the job of the "acceptor loop" would only be accepting and dispatching connections.
3. Once the request has been processed, the worker thread notifies the main thread that the response is ready and tries to read the next pending request from the queue; iterate. 4. The main thread sends the response back to the HTTP client and closes that connection. Now, there's some hand waving here, and I am not sure if what I'm describing is the proper / correct / best / possible way to do this with libuv. Some specific questions: 1. Is using a thread-safe queue a good match for libuv? If libuv provides something like this, I have not been able to find it, and that makes me doubt this would be the libuv way.
For certain scenarios such a construct would be useful, we don't provide it though. Have a loop at http://concurrencykit.org/
2. Is it possible / advisable to have multiple threads in a process, each handling I/O with its own libuv loop? I guess yes.
Yep. Nginx (which doesn't use libuv) uses a similar model.
3. How would the worker threads notify the main thread that a response is ready? Would they use an async handle for this? If yes, can they all use the same async handle, or would each worker require their own async handle plugged to the main thread loop? But if they all share the same async handle, how does the main thread know which connection this response should be sent to?
They don't need to! They can handle the connection themselves and send the response without having the main thread do it.
In case it helps, I created a multi-threaded HTTP server prototype to try out some stuff here: https://github.com/saghul/uttp It currently uses SO_REUSEPORT for kernel level connection balancing in Linux and the NOTES file https://github.com/saghul/uttp/blob/master/NOTES contains the other strategies I was going to try but never found the time :-)
I hope you find it useful. Cheers, -- Saúl Ibarra Corretgé http://bettercallsaghul.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "libuv" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/libuv. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
