TCP Replication =============== Motivation ---------- Previously the workers used an HTTP long poll mechanism to get updates from the master, which had the problem of causing a lot of duplicate work on the server. This TCP protocol replaces those APIs with the aim of increased efficiency. Overview -------- The protocol is based on fire and forget, line based commands. An example flow would be (where '>' indicates master to worker and '<' worker to master flows):: > SERVER example.com < REPLICATE events 53 > RDATA events 54 ["$foo1:bar.com", ...] > RDATA events 55 ["$foo4:bar.com", ...] The example shows the server accepting a new connection and sending its identity with the ``SERVER`` command, followed by the client asking to subscribe to the ``events`` stream from the token ``53``. The server then periodically sends ``RDATA`` commands which have the format ``RDATA ``, where the format of ```` is defined by the individual streams. Error reporting happens by either the client or server sending an `ERROR` command, and usually the connection will be closed. Since the protocol is a simple line based, its possible to manually connect to the server using a tool like netcat. A few things should be noted when manually using the protocol: * When subscribing to a stream using ``REPLICATE``, the special token ``NOW`` can be used to get all future updates. The special stream name ``ALL`` can be used with ``NOW`` to subscribe to all available streams. * The federation stream is only available if federation sending has been disabled on the main process. * The server will only time connections out that have sent a ``PING`` command. If a ping is sent then the connection will be closed if no further commands are receieved within 15s. Both the client and server protocol implementations will send an initial PING on connection and ensure at least one command every 5s is sent (not necessarily ``PING``). * ``RDATA`` commands *usually* include a numeric token, however if the stream has multiple rows to replicate per token the server will send multiple ``RDATA`` commands, with all but the last having a token of ``batch``. See the documentation on ``commands.RdataCommand`` for further details. Architecture ------------ The basic structure of the protocol is line based, where the initial word of each line specifies the command. The rest of the line is parsed based on the command. For example, the `RDATA` command is defined as:: RDATA (Note that `` may contains spaces, but cannot contain newlines.) Blank lines are ignored. Keep alives ~~~~~~~~~~~ Both sides are expected to send at least one command every 5s or so, and should send a ``PING`` command if necessary. If either side do not receive a command within e.g. 15s then the connection should be closed. Because the server may be connected to manually using e.g. netcat, the timeouts aren't enabled until an initial ``PING`` command is seen. Both the client and server implementations below send a ``PING`` command immediately on connection to ensure the timeouts are enabled. This ensures that both sides can quickly realize if the tcp connection has gone and handle the situation appropriately. Start up ~~~~~~~~ When a new connection is made, the server: * Sends a ``SERVER`` command, which includes the identity of the server, allowing the client to detect if its connected to the expected server * Sends a ``PING`` command as above, to enable the client to time out connections promptly. The client: * Sends a ``NAME`` command, allowing the server to associate a human friendly name with the connection. This is optional. * Sends a ``PING`` as above * For each stream the client wishes to subscribe to it sends a ``REPLICATE`` with the stream_name and token it wants to subscribe from. * On receipt of a ``SERVER`` command, checks that the server name matches the expected server name. Error handling ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If either side detects an error it can send an ``ERROR`` command and close the connection. If the client side loses the connection to the server it should reconnect, following the steps above. Congestion ~~~~~~~~~~ If the server sends messages faster than the client can consume them the server will first buffer a (fairly large) number of commands and then disconnect the client. This ensures that we don't queue up an unbounded number of commands in memory and gives us a potential oppurtunity to squawk loudly. When/if the client recovers it can reconnect to the server and ask for missed messages. Reliability ~~~~~~~~~~~ In general the replication stream should be considered an unreliable transport since e.g. commands are not resent if the connection disappears. The exception to that are the replication streams, i.e. RDATA commands, since these include tokens which can be used to restart the stream on connection errors. The client should keep track of the token in the last RDATA command received for each stream so that on reconneciton it can start streaming from the correct place. Note: not all RDATA have valid tokens due to batching. See ``RdataCommand`` for more details. Example ~~~~~~~ An example iteraction is shown below. Each line is prefixed with '>' or '<' to indicate which side is sending, these are *not* included on the wire:: * connection established * > SERVER localhost:8823 > PING 1490197665618 < NAME synapse.app.appservice < PING 1490197665618 < REPLICATE events 1 < REPLICATE backfill 1 < REPLICATE caches 1 > POSITION events 1 > POSITION backfill 1 > POSITION caches 1 > RDATA caches 2 ["get_user_by_id",["@01register-user:localhost:8823"],1490197670513] > RDATA events 14 ["$149019767112vOHxz:localhost:8823", "!AFDCvgApUmpdfVjIXm:localhost:8823","m.room.guest_access","",null] < PING 1490197675618 > ERROR server stopping * connection closed by server * The ``POSITION`` command sent by the server is used to set the clients position without needing to send data with the ``RDATA`` command. An example of a batched set of ``RDATA`` is:: > RDATA caches batch ["get_user_by_id",["@test:localhost:8823"],1490197670513] > RDATA caches batch ["get_user_by_id",["@test2:localhost:8823"],1490197670513] > RDATA caches batch ["get_user_by_id",["@test3:localhost:8823"],1490197670513] > RDATA caches 54 ["get_user_by_id",["@test4:localhost:8823"],1490197670513] In this case the client shouldn't advance their caches token until it sees the the last ``RDATA``.