BACKGROUND AND USE CASEj
Redis slaves are normally write only, however the supprot a "writable"
mode which is very handy when scaling reads on slaves, that actually
need write operations in order to access data. For instance imagine
having slaves replicating certain Sets keys from the master. When
accessing the data on the slave, we want to peform intersections between
such Sets values. However we don't want to intersect each time: to cache
the intersection for some time often is a good idea.
To do so, it is possible to setup a slave as a writable slave, and
perform the intersection on the slave side, perhaps setting a TTL on the
resulting key so that it will expire after some time.
THE BUG
Problem: in order to have a consistent replication, expiring of keys in
Redis replication is up to the master, that synthesize DEL operations to
send in the replication stream. However slaves logically expire keys
by hiding them from read attempts from clients so that if the master did
not promptly sent a DEL, the client still see logically expired keys
as non existing.
Because slaves don't actively expire keys by actually evicting them but
just masking from the POV of read operations, if a key is created in a
writable slave, and an expire is set, the key will be leaked forever:
1. No DEL will be received from the master, which does not know about
such a key at all.
2. No eviction will be performed by the slave, since it needs to disable
eviction because it's up to masters, otherwise consistency of data is
lost.
THE FIX
In order to fix the problem, the slave should be able to tag keys that
were created in the slave side and have an expire set in some way.
My solution involved using an unique additional dictionary created by
the writable slave only if needed. The dictionary is obviously keyed by
the key name that we need to track: all the keys that are set with an
expire directly by a client writing to the slave are tracked.
The value in the dictionary is a bitmap of all the DBs where such a key
name need to be tracked, so that we can use a single dictionary to track
keys in all the DBs used by the slave (actually this limits the solution
to the first 64 DBs, but the default with Redis is to use 16 DBs).
This solution allows to pay both a small complexity and CPU penalty,
which is zero when the feature is not used, actually. The slave-side
eviction is encapsulated in code which is not coupled with the rest of
the Redis core, if not for the hook to track the keys.
TODO
I'm doing the first smoke tests to see if the feature works as expected:
so far so good. Unit tests should be added before merging into the
4.0 branch.
It was noted by @dvirsky that it is not possible to use string functions
when writing the AOF file. This sometimes is critical since the command
rewriting may need to be built in the context of the AOF callback, and
without access to the context, and the limited types that the AOF
production functions will accept, this can be an issue.
Moreover there are other needs that we can't anticipate regarding the
ability to use Redis Modules APIs using the context in order to build
representations to emit AOF / RDB.
Because of this a new API was added that allows the user to get a
temporary context from the IO context. The context is auto released
if obtained when the RDB / AOF callback returns.
Calling multiple time the function to get the context, always returns
the same one, since it is invalid to have more than a single context.
Notes by @antirez:
This patch was picked from a larger commit by Oran and adapted to change
the API a bit. The basic idea is to avoid double lookups when there is
to use the value of the deleted entry.
BEFORE:
entry = dictFind( ... ); /* 1st lookup. */
/* Do somethjing with the entry. */
dictDelete(...); /* 2nd lookup. */
AFTER:
entry = dictUnlink( ... ); /* 1st lookup. */
/* Do somethjing with the entry. */
dictFreeUnlinkedEntry(entry); /* No lookups!. */
RedisModule_StringRetain() allows, when automatic memory management is
on, to keep string objects living after the callback returns. Can also
be used in order to use Redis reference counting of objects inside
modules.
The reason why this is useful is that sometimes when implementing new
data types we want to reference RedisModuleString objects inside the
module private data structures, so those string objects must be valid
after the callback returns even if not referenced inside the Redis key
space.
This commit changes what provided by PR #3315 (merged) in order to
let the user specify the log level as a string.
The define could be also used, but when this happens, they must be
decoupled from the defines in the Redis core, like in the other part of
the Redis modules implementations, so that a switch statement (or a
function) remaps between the two, otherwise we are no longer free to
change the internal Redis defines.
Most of the time to check the last element is the way to go, however
there are patterns where the contrary is the best choice. Zig-zag
scanning implemented in this commmit always checks the obvious element
first (the last added -- think at a loop where the last element
allocated gets freed again and again), and continues checking one
element in the head and one in the tail.
Thanks to @dvisrky that fixed the original implementation of the
function and proposed zig zag scanning.
Now that modules receive RedisModuleString objects on loading, they are
allowed to call the String API, so the context must be released
correctly.
Related to #3293.
