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cluster: use round-robin load balancing

Empirical evidence suggests that OS-level load balancing (that is,
having multiple processes listen on a socket and have the operating
system wake up one when a connection comes in) produces skewed load
distributions on Linux, Solaris and possibly other operating systems.

The observed behavior is that a fraction of the listening processes
receive the majority of the connections. From the perspective of the
operating system, that somewhat makes sense: a task switch is expensive,
to be avoided whenever possible. That's why the operating system likes
to give preferential treatment to a few processes, because it reduces
the number of switches.

However, that rather subverts the purpose of the cluster module, which
is to distribute the load as evenly as possible. That's why this commit
adds (and defaults to) round-robin support, meaning that the master
process accepts connections and distributes them to the workers in a
round-robin fashion, effectively bypassing the operating system.

Round-robin is currently disabled on Windows due to how IOCP is wired
up. It works and you can select it manually but it probably results in
a heavy performance hit.

Fixes #4435.
v0.11.2-release
Ben Noordhuis 12 years ago
parent
commit
e72cd415ad
  1. 53
      doc/api/cluster.markdown
  2. 311
      lib/cluster.js

53
doc/api/cluster.markdown

@ -53,14 +53,28 @@ The worker processes are spawned using the `child_process.fork` method,
so that they can communicate with the parent via IPC and pass server
handles back and forth.
When you call `server.listen(...)` in a worker, it serializes the
arguments and passes the request to the master process. If the master
process already has a listening server matching the worker's
requirements, then it passes the handle to the worker. If it does not
already have a listening server matching that requirement, then it will
create one, and pass the handle to the child.
The cluster module supports two methods of distributing incoming
connections.
The first one (and the default one on all platforms except Windows),
is the round-robin approach, where the master process listens on a
port, accepts new connections and distributes them across the workers
in a round-robin fashion, with some built-in smarts to avoid
overloading a worker process.
The second approach is where the master process creates the listen
socket and sends it to interested workers. The workers then accept
incoming connections directly.
The second approach should, in theory, give the best performance.
In practice however, distribution tends to be very unbalanced due
to operating system scheduler vagaries. Loads have been observed
where over 70% of all connections ended up in just two processes,
out of a total of eight.
This causes potentially surprising behavior in three edge cases:
Because `server.listen()` hands off most of the work to the master
process, there are three cases where the behavior between a normal
node.js process and a cluster worker differs:
1. `server.listen({fd: 7})` Because the message is passed to the master,
file descriptor 7 **in the parent** will be listened on, and the
@ -77,12 +91,10 @@ This causes potentially surprising behavior in three edge cases:
want to listen on a unique port, generate a port number based on the
cluster worker ID.
When multiple processes are all `accept()`ing on the same underlying
resource, the operating system load-balances across them very
efficiently. There is no routing logic in Node.js, or in your program,
and no shared state between the workers. Therefore, it is important to
design your program such that it does not rely too heavily on in-memory
data objects for things like sessions and login.
There is no routing logic in Node.js, or in your program, and no shared
state between the workers. Therefore, it is important to design your
program such that it does not rely too heavily on in-memory data objects
for things like sessions and login.
Because workers are all separate processes, they can be killed or
re-spawned depending on your program's needs, without affecting other
@ -91,6 +103,21 @@ continue to accept connections. Node does not automatically manage the
number of workers for you, however. It is your responsibility to manage
the worker pool for your application's needs.
## cluster.schedulingPolicy
The scheduling policy, either `cluster.SCHED_RR` for round-robin or
`cluster.SCHED_NONE` to leave it to the operating system. This is a
global setting and effectively frozen once you spawn the first worker
or call `cluster.setupMaster()`, whatever comes first.
`SCHED_RR` is the default on all operating systems except Windows.
Windows will change to `SCHED_RR` once libuv is able to effectively
distribute IOCP handles without incurring a large performance hit.
`cluster.schedulingPolicy` can also be set through the
`NODE_CLUSTER_SCHED_POLICY` environment variable. Valid
values are `"rr"` and `"none"`.
## cluster.settings
* {Object}

311
lib/cluster.js

@ -25,6 +25,8 @@ var dgram = require('dgram');
var fork = require('child_process').fork;
var net = require('net');
var util = require('util');
var SCHED_NONE = 1;
var SCHED_RR = 2;
var cluster = new EventEmitter;
module.exports = cluster;
@ -52,6 +54,121 @@ Worker.prototype.send = function() {
// Master/worker specific methods are defined in the *Init() functions.
function SharedHandle(key, address, port, addressType, backlog, fd) {
this.key = key;
this.errno = '';
this.workers = [];
if (addressType === 'udp4' || addressType === 'udp6')
this.handle = dgram._createSocketHandle(address, port, addressType, fd);
else
this.handle = net._createServerHandle(address, port, addressType, fd);
this.errno = this.handle ? '' : process._errno;
}
SharedHandle.prototype.add = function(worker, send) {
assert(this.workers.indexOf(worker) === -1);
this.workers.push(worker);
send(this.errno, null, this.handle);
};
SharedHandle.prototype.remove = function(worker) {
var index = this.workers.indexOf(worker);
assert(index !== -1);
this.workers.splice(index, 1);
if (this.workers.length !== 0) return false;
this.handle.close();
this.handle = null;
return true;
};
// Start a round-robin server. Master accepts connections and distributes
// them over the workers.
function RoundRobinHandle(key, address, port, addressType, backlog, fd) {
this.key = key;
this.all = {};
this.free = [];
this.handles = [];
this.handle = null;
this.server = net.createServer(assert.fail);
if (fd >= 0)
this.server.listen({ fd: fd });
else if (port >= 0)
this.server.listen(port, address);
else
this.server.listen(address); // UNIX socket path.
var self = this;
this.server.once('listening', function() {
self.handle = self.server._handle;
self.handle.onconnection = self.distribute.bind(self);
self.server._handle = null;
self.server = null;
});
}
RoundRobinHandle.prototype.add = function(worker, send) {
assert(worker.id in this.all === false);
this.all[worker.id] = worker;
var self = this;
function done() {
if (self.handle.getsockname)
send(null, { sockname: self.handle.getsockname() }, null);
else
send(null, null, null); // UNIX socket.
self.handoff(worker); // In case there are connections pending.
}
if (this.server === null) return done();
// Still busy binding.
this.server.once('listening', done);
this.server.once('error', function(err) {
send(err.errno, null);
});
};
RoundRobinHandle.prototype.remove = function(worker) {
if (worker.id in this.all === false) return false;
delete this.all[worker.id];
var index = this.free.indexOf(worker);
if (index !== -1) this.free.splice(index, 1);
if (Object.getOwnPropertyNames(this.all).length !== 0) return false;
for (var handle; handle = this.handles.shift(); handle.close());
this.handle.close();
this.handle = null;
return true;
};
RoundRobinHandle.prototype.distribute = function(handle) {
this.handles.push(handle);
var worker = this.free.shift();
if (worker) this.handoff(worker);
};
RoundRobinHandle.prototype.handoff = function(worker) {
if (worker.id in this.all === false) {
return; // Worker is closing (or has closed) the server.
}
var handle = this.handles.shift();
if (typeof handle === 'undefined') {
this.free.push(worker); // Add to ready queue again.
return;
}
var message = { act: 'newconn', key: this.key };
var self = this;
sendHelper(worker.process, message, handle, function(reply) {
if (reply.accepted)
handle.close();
else
self.distribute(handle); // Worker is shutting down. Send to another.
self.handoff(worker);
});
};
if (cluster.isMaster)
masterInit();
@ -90,11 +207,25 @@ function masterInit() {
};
cluster.settings = settings;
// Indexed by address:port:etc key. Its entries are dicts with handle and
// workers keys. That second one is a list of workers that hold a reference
// to the handle. When a worker dies, we scan the dicts and close the handle
// when its reference count drops to zero. Yes, that means we're doing an
// O(n*m) scan but n and m are small and worker deaths are rare events anyway.
// XXX(bnoordhuis) Fold cluster.schedulingPolicy into cluster.settings?
var schedulingPolicy = {
'none': SCHED_NONE,
'rr': SCHED_RR
}[process.env.NODE_CLUSTER_SCHED_POLICY];
if (typeof schedulingPolicy === 'undefined') {
// FIXME Round-robin doesn't perform well on Windows right now due to the
// way IOCP is wired up. Bert is going to fix that, eventually.
schedulingPolicy = (process.platform === 'win32') ? SCHED_NONE : SCHED_RR;
}
cluster.schedulingPolicy = schedulingPolicy;
cluster.SCHED_NONE = SCHED_NONE; // Leave it to the operating system.
cluster.SCHED_RR = SCHED_RR; // Master distributes connections.
// Keyed on address:port:etc. When a worker dies, we walk over the handles
// and remove() the worker from each one. remove() may do a linear scan
// itself so we might end up with an O(n*m) operation. Ergo, FIXME.
var handles = {};
var initialized = false;
@ -111,6 +242,9 @@ function masterInit() {
{
settings.execArgv = settings.execArgv.concat(['--logfile=v8-%p.log']);
}
schedulingPolicy = cluster.schedulingPolicy; // Freeze policy.
assert(schedulingPolicy === SCHED_NONE || schedulingPolicy === SCHED_RR,
'Bad cluster.schedulingPolicy: ' + schedulingPolicy);
cluster.settings = settings;
process.on('internalMessage', function(message) {
@ -169,15 +303,9 @@ function masterInit() {
cluster.on('disconnect', function(worker) {
delete cluster.workers[worker.id];
// O(n*m) scan but for small values of n and m.
for (var key in handles) {
var e = handles[key];
var i = e.workers.indexOf(worker);
if (i === -1) continue;
e.workers.splice(i, 1);
if (e.workers.length !== 0) continue;
e.handle.close();
delete handles[key];
var handle = handles[key];
if (handle.remove(worker)) delete handles[key];
}
if (Object.keys(handles).length === 0) {
intercom.emit('disconnect');
@ -210,6 +338,8 @@ function masterInit() {
listening(worker, message);
else if (message.act === 'suicide')
worker.suicide = true;
else if (message.act === 'close')
close(worker, message);
}
function online(worker) {
@ -224,17 +354,32 @@ function masterInit() {
message.addressType,
message.fd];
var key = args.join(':');
var e = handles[key];
if (typeof e === 'undefined') {
e = { workers: [] };
if (message.addressType === 'udp4' || message.addressType === 'udp6')
e.handle = dgram._createSocketHandle.apply(null, args);
else
e.handle = net._createServerHandle.apply(null, args);
handles[key] = e;
var handle = handles[key];
if (typeof handle === 'undefined') {
var constructor = RoundRobinHandle;
// UDP is exempt from round-robin connection balancing for what should
// be obvious reasons: it's connectionless. There is nothing to send to
// the workers except raw datagrams and that's pointless.
if (schedulingPolicy !== SCHED_RR ||
message.addressType === 'udp4' ||
message.addressType === 'udp6') {
constructor = SharedHandle;
}
handles[key] = handle = new constructor(key,
message.address,
message.port,
message.addressType,
message.backlog,
message.fd);
}
e.workers.push(worker);
send(worker, { ack: message.seq }, e.handle);
handle.add(worker, function(errno, reply, handle) {
reply = util._extend({ ack: message.seq, key: key }, reply);
if (errno) {
reply.errno = errno;
delete handles[key]; // Gives other workers a chance to retry.
}
send(worker, reply, handle);
});
}
function listening(worker, message) {
@ -249,6 +394,13 @@ function masterInit() {
cluster.emit('listening', worker, info);
}
// Round-robin only. Server in worker is closing, remove from list.
function close(worker, message) {
var key = message.key;
var handle = handles[key];
if (handle.remove(worker)) delete handles[key];
}
function send(worker, message, handle, cb) {
sendHelper(worker.process, message, handle, cb);
}
@ -256,7 +408,7 @@ function masterInit() {
function workerInit() {
var handles = [];
var handles = {};
// Called from src/node.js
cluster._setupWorker = function() {
@ -269,7 +421,10 @@ function workerInit() {
process.on('internalMessage', internal(worker, onmessage));
send({ act: 'online' });
function onmessage(message, handle) {
if (message.act === 'disconnect') worker.disconnect();
if (message.act === 'newconn')
onconnection(message, handle);
else if (message.act === 'disconnect')
worker.disconnect();
}
};
@ -282,28 +437,108 @@ function workerInit() {
act: 'queryServer',
fd: fd
};
send(message, function(_, handle) {
// Monkey-patch the close() method so we can keep track of when it's
// closed. Avoids resource leaks when the handle is short-lived.
var close = handle.close;
handle.close = function() {
var index = handles.indexOf(handle);
if (index !== -1) handles.splice(index, 1);
return close.apply(this, arguments);
};
handles.push(handle);
cb(handle);
send(message, function(reply, handle) {
if (handle)
shared(reply, handle, cb); // Shared listen socket.
else
rr(reply, cb); // Round-robin.
});
obj.once('listening', function() {
cluster.worker.state = 'listening';
var address = obj.address();
message.act = 'listening';
message.port = obj.address().port || port;
message.port = address && address.port || port,
send(message);
});
};
// Shared listen socket.
function shared(message, handle, cb) {
var key = message.key;
// Monkey-patch the close() method so we can keep track of when it's
// closed. Avoids resource leaks when the handle is short-lived.
var close = handle.close;
handle.close = function() {
delete handles[key];
return close.apply(this, arguments);
};
assert(typeof handles[key] === 'undefined');
handles[key] = handle;
cb(handle);
}
// Round-robin. Master distributes handles across workers.
function rr(message, cb) {
if (message.errno)
onerror(message, cb);
else
onsuccess(message, cb);
function onerror(message, cb) {
function listen(backlog) {
process._errno = message.errno;
return -1;
}
function close() {
}
cb({ close: close, listen: listen });
}
function onsuccess(message, cb) {
var key = message.key;
function listen(backlog) {
// TODO(bnoordhuis) Send a message to the master that tells it to
// update the backlog size. The actual backlog should probably be
// the largest requested size by any worker.
return 0;
}
function close() {
// lib/net.js treats server._handle.close() as effectively synchronous.
// That means there is a time window between the call to close() and
// the ack by the master process in which we can still receive handles.
// onconnection() below handles that by sending those handles back to
// the master.
if (typeof key === 'undefined') return;
send({ act: 'close', key: key });
delete handles[key];
key = undefined;
}
function getsockname() {
var rv = {};
if (key) return util._extend(rv, message.sockname);
return rv;
}
// Faux handle. Mimics a TCPWrap with just enough fidelity to get away
// with it. Fools net.Server into thinking that it's backed by a real
// handle.
var handle = {
close: close,
listen: listen
};
if (message.sockname) {
handle.getsockname = getsockname; // TCP handles only.
}
assert(typeof handles[key] === 'undefined');
handles[key] = handle;
cb(handle);
}
}
// Round-robin connection.
function onconnection(message, handle) {
var key = message.key;
var server = handles[key];
var accepted = (typeof server !== 'undefined');
send({ ack: message.seq, accepted: accepted });
if (accepted) server.onconnection(handle);
}
Worker.prototype.disconnect = function() {
for (var handle; handle = handles.shift(); handle.close());
for (var key in handles) {
var handle = handles[key];
delete handles[key];
handle.close();
}
process.disconnect();
};

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