Recovering from partial writes

[Peter Booth]

How large is a large POST payload?
Are the nginx and upstream systems physical hosts in same data center?
What are approx best case / typical case / worst case latency for the post to upstream?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 22, 2018, at 2:40 PM, scott.oaks at oracle.com wrote:
> 
> I have an nginx proxy through which clients pass a large POST payload to the upstream server. Sometimes, the upstream server is slow and so writing the POST data will fail with a writev() not ready (EAGAIN) error. But of course, that's a very common situation when dealing with non-blocking I/O, and I'd expect the rest of the data to be written when the socket is again ready for writing.
> 
> In fact, it seems like the basic structure of that is in place; when ngx_writev gets the EAGAIN, it passes that to calling functions, which modify the chain buffers. Yet somewhere along the line (seemingly in ngx_http_upstream_send_request_body) the partially-written buffer is freed, and although the socket later indicates that it is ready to write (and the ngx epoll module does detect that), there is no longer any data to write and so everything fails.
> 
> I realize this is not the dev mailing list so an answer to how that is programmed isn't necessarily what I'm after -- again, the partial write of data to a socket is such a common thing that I can't think I'm the first to encounter it and find a basic bug, so I assume that something else is going on. I have tried this with proxy_request_buffering off and on, and the failure is essentially the same. The http section of my conf looks like this:
> 
> http {
>    max_ranges 1;
>    #map $http_accept $file_extension {
>    #   default   ".html";
>    #    "~*json"  ".json";
>    #}
>    map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
>        default upgrade;
>        '' "";
>    }
>    server_names_hash_bucket_size 512;
>    server_names_hash_max_size 2048;
>    variables_hash_bucket_size 512;
>    variables_hash_max_size 2048;
>    client_header_buffer_size 8k;
>    large_client_header_buffers 4 16k;
>    proxy_buffering off;
>    proxy_request_buffering off; # Tried on, and various sizes
>    #proxy_buffer_size 16k;
>    #proxy_buffers 4 128k;
>    #proxy_busy_buffers_size 256k;
>    #proxy_headers_hash_bucket_size 256;
>    client_max_body_size 0;
>    ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:20m;
>    ssl_session_timeout 60m;
> 
>    include       /u01/data/config/nginx/mime.types;
>    default_type  application/octet-stream;
> 
>    log_format  main  '"$remote_addr" "-" "$remote_user" "[$time_local]" "$request" '
>                      '"$status" "$body_bytes_sent" "$http_referer" '
>                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
> 
>    log_format  opcroutingtier  '"$remote_addr" "-" "$remote_user" [$time_local] "$request" "$status" '
>                                '"$body_bytes_sent" "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$bytes_sent" "$request_length" "-" '
>                                '"$host" "$http_x_forwarded_for" "$server_name" "$server_port" "$request_time" "$upstream_addr" '
>                                '"$upstream_connect_time" "$upstream_header_time" "$upstream_response_time" "$upstream_status" "$ssl_cipher" "$ssl_protocol" '
>                                '"-" "-" "-"';
> 
>    access_log  /u01/data/logs/nginx_logs/access_logs/access.log  opcroutingtier;
>    sendfile        off;  # also tried on
>    keepalive_timeout 60s;
>    keepalive_requests 2000000;
>    open_file_cache max=2000 inactive=20s;
>    open_file_cache_valid 60s;
>    open_file_cache_min_uses 5;
>    open_file_cache_errors off;
>    gzip on;
>    gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript text/xml application/x-javascript application/xml;
>    gzip_min_length 500;
>    gzip_comp_level 7;
> 
> Everything works fine if the upstream reads data fast enough; it's only when nginx gets a partial write upstream that there is a problem. Am I missing something here?
> 
> -Scott
> 
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