barrel - generic TCP acceptor pool

Copyright (c) 2013 Benoît Chesneau.

Version: 2.1

barrel is a generic TCP acceptor pool with low latency in Erlang.

Main Features:

• start/stop TCP and SSL listener
• can be use with different transports based on an "accept" model. (can be stcp, uTCP...)
• Low latency when accepting connection
• Any protocol can be used, can be HTTP, IRC or anything you want.
• Graceful reload of protocol configurations
• Scale the number of concurrent connections accepted at the same time
• Scale the number of concurrent connections handled by a listener

Design

The design of barrel differs from ranch. Instead of spawning a new handler for each request, then making it control the socket - which can be slow - barrel spawns new acceptors. The accepted socket will continue to be used in the same process that accepted it previously. Optionally you can launch a process to handle the accepted socket if you want. The choice is yours.

Usage

Create a simple TCP echo server.

1. Create a simple echo handler

-module(echo_handler).

-export([init/3]).

init(_ListenerRef, Transport, Socket, _Opts) ->
    wait_request(Transport, Socket).

wait_request(Transport, Socket) ->
    case  Transport:recv(Socket, 0, 5000) of
        {ok, <<".\r\n">>} ->
            io:format("remote exited", []),
            Transport:close(Socket);
        {ok, Data} ->
            io:format("got ~p~n", [Data]),
            Transport:send(Socket, Data),
            wait_request(Transport, Socket);
        {error, _Reason} ->
            Transport:close(Socket)
    end.

init/4 is the function that receives the transport (barrel_tcp if TCP or barrel_ssl if SSL) socket.

Note that, by default, barrel uses the process accepting the connection to handle the request. In other words, the acceptor process becomes the request process. In the other case you may want to launch a new process instead and pass the control of the socket to it (which is the only way to do it in ranch). In this case instead of init/4 use a start_link/4 function. Eg. :

start_link(Ref, Transport, Socket, _Opts) ->
    Pid = spawn_link(?MODULE, init, [Ref, Transport, Socket]),
    {ok, Pid}.

init(Ref, Transport, Socket) ->
    ok = barrel:accept_ack(Ref),
    wait_request(Transport, Socket).

    ...

To start the listener do the following:

Ref = echo,
NbAcceptors = 100,
Transport = barrel_tcp,
TransporOptions =  [{port, 10001}],
Protocol = echo_handler,
ProtocolOptions = [],
barrel:start_listener(Ref, NbAcceptors, Transport, TransportOptions,
                      Protocol, ProtocolOptions).

A Ref can be any Erlang term used to identify a listener. A listener is a gen_server that manages all the acceptors workers and handles connection shutdowns.

A Protocol is the protocol used to handle a connection. It can be any module following the protocol behaviour. Currently Barrel handles the TCP (barel_tcp) and SSL/TLS (barel_ssl) protocols.

A Protocol is what will be used to handle the data coming from the socket. You can pass ProtocolOpts to it.

Additionaly you can pass custom options to the listener. This is where you pass the SSL options, for example.

The full example can be found in the example folder.

Scale

Number of acceptors

There are 2 way of scaling a listener in barrel. One is to increase the number of acceptors. By default the the number of acceptors is 100.

To do it use the barrel:set_nb_acceptors/2 function.

Increasing the number of acceptors will increase the number of concurrent connections you can accept at the same time

Number of clients

While increasing the number of acceptors increase the number of concurrent connections you accept at the same time; you can also fix the number of concurrent conncections (clients) you are willing to handle. This can be used to limit the usage of the resources (memory and file descriptors).

To do it use the barrel:set_max_client/2 function.

Load a new protocol configuration

Barrel allows you to either change the protocol handler or its configuration without closing the active connections.

What happens here is that once you pass a new protocol configuration using the function barrel:set_protocol_conf/4 to the listener, new acceptors will be launched with the new configuration and old acceptors will get killed right after. Once it's done, a graceful shutdown will be sent to the remaining connections. If the graceful timeout is not defined, the connections will continue to run until they die, otherwise the connections will get killed after that time passes. This behaviour is similar to the one you can find in nginx.

Contribute

For issues, comments or feedback please create an issue.

Notes for developers

If you want to contribute patches or improve the docs, you will need to build Barrel using the rebar_dev.config file. It can also be built using the Makefile:

$ make dev ; # compile & get deps
$ make devclean ; # clean all files

Modules

barrel

barrel_acceptor

barrel_app

barrel_connections

barrel_deps

barrel_listener

barrel_server

barrel_ssl

barrel_sup

barrel_tcp

barrel_util