Usage of the shadow field in ngx_buf_t?

[Brian Pane]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Igor Sysoev <igor at sysoev.ru> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 12:08:29PM -0800, Brian Pane wrote:
>
> > Can someone explain (or point me to some documentation on) the meaning of
> > the shadow field in ngx_buf_t?
>
> This is ancient thing and I do not like it. It was initially introduced
> in code used by proxy and fastcgi to bookkeeping buf's saved in temporary
> files. But now I think this is overengineered thing. Then it also used
> to bookkeeping in SSI filter. Probably, it should rwritten, too.
>
> > I'm writing a body filter, and I'm trying to
> > figure out whether the presence of a non-null shadow in a buffer means
> that
> > I need to do any special processing.
>
> No.


Thanks.  A follow-up question: When a body filter is processing buffers that
were produced by the proxy module (i.e., buffers containing an HTTP response
from a back-end server), is it safe to discard those buffers?

As a trivial example, imagine that you have a body filter that simply
returns NGX_OK, in order to prevent the response body from being
sent to the client. Is that a safe thing to do?  Or is it necessary to
pass the buffers through to the standard filters?  It's not clear to me
whether anything in the standard filter chain needs to see the buffers
containing the upstream response in order to do cleanup or flow control.

Thanks,
-Brian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/attachments/20091203/76c859e3/attachment.html>