Since commit cfd97c6f was merged into 1.5-dev14 (BUG/MEDIUM: checks:
prevent TIME_WAITs from appearing also on timeouts), some valid health
checks sometimes used to show some TCP resets. For example, this HTTP
health check sent to a local server :
19:55:15.742818 IP 127.0.0.1.16568 > 127.0.0.1.8000: S 3355859679:3355859679(0) win 32792 <mss 16396,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>
19:55:15.742841 IP 127.0.0.1.8000 > 127.0.0.1.16568: S 1060952566:1060952566(0) ack 3355859680 win 32792 <mss 16396,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>
19:55:15.742863 IP 127.0.0.1.16568 > 127.0.0.1.8000: . ack 1 win 257
19:55:15.745402 IP 127.0.0.1.16568 > 127.0.0.1.8000: P 1:23(22) ack 1 win 257
19:55:15.745488 IP 127.0.0.1.8000 > 127.0.0.1.16568: FP 1:146(145) ack 23 win 257
19:55:15.747109 IP 127.0.0.1.16568 > 127.0.0.1.8000: R 23:23(0) ack 147 win 257
After some discussion with Chris Huang-Leaver, it appeared clear that
what we want is to only send the RST when we have no other choice, which
means when the server has not closed. So we still keep SYN/SYN-ACK/RST
for pure TCP checks, but don't want to see an RST emitted as above when
the server has already sent the FIN.
The solution against this consists in implementing a "drain" function at
the protocol layer, which, when defined, causes as much as possible of
the input socket buffer to be flushed to make recv() return zero so that
we know that the server's FIN was received and ACKed. On Linux, we can make
use of MSG_TRUNC on TCP sockets, which has the benefit of draining everything
at once without even copying data. On other platforms, we read up to one
buffer of data before the close. If recv() manages to get the final zero,
we don't disable lingering. Same for hard errors. Otherwise we do.
In practice, on HTTP health checks we generally find that the close was
pending and is returned upon first recv() call. The network trace becomes
cleaner :
19:55:23.650621 IP 127.0.0.1.16561 > 127.0.0.1.8000: S 3982804816:3982804816(0) win 32792 <mss 16396,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>
19:55:23.650644 IP 127.0.0.1.8000 > 127.0.0.1.16561: S 4082139313:4082139313(0) ack 3982804817 win 32792 <mss 16396,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>
19:55:23.650666 IP 127.0.0.1.16561 > 127.0.0.1.8000: . ack 1 win 257
19:55:23.651615 IP 127.0.0.1.16561 > 127.0.0.1.8000: P 1:23(22) ack 1 win 257
19:55:23.651696 IP 127.0.0.1.8000 > 127.0.0.1.16561: FP 1:146(145) ack 23 win 257
19:55:23.652628 IP 127.0.0.1.16561 > 127.0.0.1.8000: F 23:23(0) ack 147 win 257
19:55:23.652655 IP 127.0.0.1.8000 > 127.0.0.1.16561: . ack 24 win 257
This change should be backported to 1.4 which is where Chris encountered
this issue. The code is different, so probably the tcp_drain() function
will have to be put in the checks only.
2b57cb8f30