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

[Roberto Peon <[e-mail]>]

Hey, you're the one worried about the size of the compressor state (which
would be ~4 or 8k)! :)
Headers are sometimes larger individually, and the upper limit to the size
of this state is the sum of 10s to 100s of these.

I think that, pragmatically, since there is a framing-layer solution which
ensures that one must not store headers for longer that necessary, and
which is semantic-layer agnostic, it is a decent bet.
Any approach other than declaring it as unidirectional (or equivalent)
either requires the caching of much state, or a NACK from the remote side.

That isn't to say that Martin's approach doesn't have appeal. I want to
like it, but unless we are to have unlimited streams in some limbo state,
it would require a NACK, else I won't be able to correlate sets of headers
on a stream and the NACK both requires more machinery at both ends, and
consumes more bytes on the wire.
-=R



On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:19 PM, James M Snell <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Ok.. going back over the thread in detail and over the spec again, one
> approach to addressing the overall concern here (and hopefully bring a
> bit more rigor to the overall design) is to redefine the stream states
> slightly along the same lines already suggested by Martin. Each
> endpoint would maintain its own view of the current activity state of
> every stream in a session, however, the state would only reflect the
> actions taken by the peer endpoint. There are five possible activity
> states:
>
> Unused
>   The peer endpoint has not reserved or used the stream in any way.
>
> Open
>   The endpoint has received frames on the stream from the peer, none
> of which are type RST_STREAM or have the FINAL flag set.
>
> Closed
>   The endpoint has received an RST_STREAM frame, or any frame with the
> FINAL flag set from the peer
>
> Reserved-Open
>   The peer has reserved the stream identifier for future use but
> frames have not yet been received on that stream. The receiving
> endpoint is expected to send its own frames on the same stream.
>
> Reserved-Closed
>   The peer has reserved the stream identifier for future use but
> frames have not yet been received on that stream. The receiving
> endpoint is not expected to send its own frames on the same stream.
>
> MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS == The number of streams in the Open state the
> endpoint will permit the peer to initiate at any given time. Once that
> limit is reached, the receiving endpoint will likely begin rejecting
> new streams using RST_STREAM. In other words, right now,
> MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS is defined in terms of what the sending
> endpoint must not do. This changes the definition to an indication of
> what the receiving endpoint will do once a particular threshold is
> reached. Any endpoint that wants to be able to keep creating streams
> must be diligent about sending FINAL frames, etc.
>
> As for the Request-Response bounding issue, that's really an HTTP
> semantic layer notion. I'm not fully convinced we really need to
> handle that issue in the framing layer at all.
>
>
> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:20 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 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >>> >
> >>> >
> >>
> >>
> >
>