Re: Design Issue: Max Concurrent Streams Limit and Unidirectional Streams

[William Chan (陈智昌) <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Roberto Peon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> The biggest rub in Martin's suggestion is that, as a stream initiator, I
> no longer know for how long I should keep the original "request" headers
> around.
> I view that as an annoying problem (I want every response to be
> attributable to a request).
>

I spent time thinking about whether or not this was a problem. I certainly
found it annoying, but it might be change aversion from SPDY. My mental
reduction of this suggestion was the coupling of directions of the stream
was moving out of the streaming layer to the application semantics layer.
At the HTTP semantic layer, where you want a response for every request,
the client can open a client=>server direction stream at the streaming
layer and register a callback for the server=>client direction stream at
the streaming layer. The client keeps the original request headers as long
as it's expecting the response stream.

I think there's a certain aesthetic layering cleanliness to Martin's
suggestion in this way by moving the coupling out from a lower layer to a
higher layer. I am still mulling it over. I also haven't thought through
the server case, so I might have missed how this is annoying for them.


>
> I also think it is a bit confusing-- how would it be used in cases where
> I've sent all my data on what I thought was a unidirectional stream, and
> then receive bytes from the other side on that stream. That'd be... weird.
>

That'd be wrong at the semantic layer and should probably trigger an error.


>
> With the unidirectional bit (or similar declaration of half-closed
> start-state), I now know (by fiat, essentially) that I will not receive a
> response on that stream ID, and so I don't need to keep the "request"
> headers around after I've finished pushing the stream. Logging accomplished.
>
>
> I think this is an easy issue to solve by reinstating the unidirectional
> bit (for now). It is certainly minimal work to have servers which do server
> push set that bit.
>

Agreed.


>
> To Will's point, I agree that an "ENHANCE YOUR CALM" code seems redundant.
> In my case I believe it redundant because the remote side has already
> received my settings frame, or is sending without having known it (i.e.
> within the initial RTT), and will be receiving the SETTINGS frame before it
> could process this new code anyway (assuming I'm following spec and sending
> SETTINGS immediately upon session establishment).
> -=R
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 11:28 AM, William Chan (陈智昌) <[e-mail]
> > wrote:
>
>> I guess I kinda think that we're worrying too much about this corner of
>> the spec. I don't view it as a big deal in practice. The problem described
>> happens when MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS is too low to allow enough parallelism
>> per roundtrip. I would advise people to simply increase their
>> MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS in that case. I kinda think this is only problematic
>> when we have very high latencies and devices that can't handle high
>> parallelism, like an interplanetary refrigerator that speaks HTTP/2 for
>> some reason. <shrug>
>>
>> I am unsure how to feel about a ENHANCE YOUR CALM code as it's not well
>> defined. I don't mind RST_STREAMs on exceeding limits, like the initial
>> MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS, since they're usually the result of a race (the
>> possible initial SETTINGS frame race) and we won't have to keep continually
>> sending RST_STREAMs to rate limit appropriately.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 3:02 PM, James M Snell <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> The impact on client-to-server initiated streams is another reason why
>>> I suggested the credit-based approach and why it would likely be good
>>> to have an RST_STREAM "ENHANCE YOUR CALM" error code [1]. If the
>>> client misbehaves and sends too much too quickly, we have flow
>>> control, settings, rst_stream and goaway options to deal with it.
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Server_Error
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:34 AM, William Chan (陈智昌)
>>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> > As I understand the proposal, which I believe ties into the issue James
>>> > raised at the beginning here, the goal is to be able to open and close
>>> a
>>> > directional stream without an ACK, which I am nervous about as I said
>>> above
>>> > without much detail. Concretely speaking, a HTTP GET is a
>>> HEADERS+PRIORITY
>>> > frame with a FINAL flag or an extra DATA frame with FINAL flag. This
>>> means
>>> > that the request effectively never gets counted against the directional
>>> > stream limit, as controlled by the receiver which sends a
>>> > MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS setting, since it open and closes the direction
>>> in
>>> > the same frame (or closes in the subsequent empty DATA frame).
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Martin Thomson <
>>> [e-mail]>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> On 3 May 2013 09:44, William Chan (陈智昌) <[e-mail]>
>>> wrote:
>>> >> > I'd like server folks to chime in, but doing this makes me feel a
>>> bit
>>> >> > nervous. I feel this effectively disables the directional concurrent
>>> >> > streams
>>> >> > limit. The bidirectional full-close essentially acts like an ACK, so
>>> >> > removing it might result in an unbounded number of streams.
>>> >>
>>> >> I think that I know what you mean here, but can you try to expand a
>>> >> little?  Do you refer to the possible gap between close on the
>>> >> initiating direction and the first frame on the responding direction;
>>> >> a gap that might cause the stream to escape accounting?  I think that
>>> >> is a tractable problem - any unbounded-ness is under the control of
>>> >> the initiating peer.
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>
>>
>