In 1.4-dev3, commit 31971e5 ("[MEDIUM] add support for infinite forwarding")
made it possible to configure the lower layer to forward data indefinitely
by setting the forward size to CHN_INFINITE_FORWARD (4GB-1). By then larger
chunk sizes were not supported so there was no confusion in the usage of the
function.
Since 1.5 we support 64-bit content-lengths and chunk sizes and the function
has grown to support 64-bit arguments, though it still limits a single pass
to 32-bit quantities (what fit in the channel's to_forward field). The issue
now becomes that a 4GB-1 content-length can be confused with infinite
forwarding (in fact it's 4GB-1+what was already in the buffer). It causes a
visible effect when transferring this exact size because the transfer rate
is lower than with other sizes due in part to the disabling of the Nagle
algorithm on the sendto() call.
In theory with keep-alive it should prevent a second request from being
processed after such a transfer, but since the analysers are still present,
the forwarding analyser properly counts down the remaining size to transfer
and ultimately the transaction gets correctly reset so there is no visible
effect.
Since the root cause of the issue is an API problem (lack of distinction
between a real valid length and a magic value), this patch modifies the API
to have a new dedicated function called channel_forward_forever() to program
a permanent forwarding. The existing function __channel_forward() was modified
to properly take care of the requested sizes and ensure it 1) never overflows
and 2) never reaches CHN_INFINITE_FORWARD by accident.
It is worth noting that the function used to have a bug causing a 2GB
forward to be scheduled if it was called with less data than what is present
in buf->i. Fortunately this bug couldn't be triggered with existing code.
This fix should be backported to 1.6 and 1.5. While it also theorically
affects 1.4, it's better not to backport it there, as the risk of breaking
large object transfers due to significant API differences is high, compared
to the fact that the largest supported objects (4GB-1) are just slower to
transfer.
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