apparent deadlock with fastcgi

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 06:18:59PM -0400, jkl wrote:

> I have a simple fastcgi responder that converts a JSON post to a CSV
> download. It works in a streaming fashion, writing the response before
> finishing reading the request. According to the FastCGI specification, such
> operation is allowed:
> 
> http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fcgi-spec.html
> 
> "The Responder application sends CGI/1.1 stdout data to the Web server over
> FCGI_STDOUT, and CGI/1.1 stderr data over FCGI_STDERR. The application sends
> these concurrently, not one after the other. The application must wait to
> finish reading FCGI_PARAMS before it begins writing FCGI_STDOUT and
> FCGI_STDERR, but it needn't finish reading from FCGI_STDIN before it begins
> writing these two streams."
> 
> Using a debugger I observe that my responder blocks while reading from
> FCGI_STDIN before I have received the whole request, which I think implies
> there is a bug on the nginx side.
> 
> If I buffer the entire response in memory before sending it to back to
> nginx, I don't see the problem with the blocking read on the request.
> 
> I only observe this problem when the request is "large enough", but I'm not
> sure what exact size triggers the problem.
> 
> Does nginx support this sort of behavior for fastcgi responders? If not, is
> that fact documented somewhere that I missed?

It's not supported.  As long as nginx sees full response headers - 
it considers rest of request body unneeded and stops sending it.


-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.com/support.html