Message Passing for the Non-Blocked Mind
Introduction and Terminology
This is a tutorial about how to get the swing of the AnyEvent::MP module family, which allows processes to transparently pass messages to itself and to other processes on the same or a different host.
What kind of messages? Basically a message here means a list of Perl strings, numbers, hashes and arrays, anything that can be expressed as a JSON text (as JSON is the default serialiser in the protocol). Here are two examples:
write_log => 1251555874, "action was successful.\n"
123, ["a", "b", "c"], { foo => "bar" }When using AnyEvent::MP it is customary to use a descriptive string as first element of a message that indicates the type of the message. This element is called a tag in AnyEvent::MP, as some API functions (rcv) support matching it directly.
Supposedly you want to send some kind of ping message with your current time to somewhere, this is how such a message might look like (in Perl syntax):
ping => 1251381636Now that we know what a message is, to which entities are those messages being passed? They are passed to ports. A port is a destination for messages but also a context to execute code: when a runtime error occurs while executing code belonging to a port, the exception will be raised on the port and can even travel to interested parties on other nodes, which makes supervision of distributed processes easy.
How do these ports relate to things you know? Each port belongs to a node, and a node is just the UNIX process that runs your AnyEvent::MP application.
Each node is distinguished from other nodes running on the same or another host in a network by its node ID. A node ID is simply a unique string chosen manually or assigned by AnyEvent::MP in some way (UNIX nodename, random string...).
Here is a diagram about how nodes, ports and UNIX processes relate to each other. The setup consists of two nodes (more are of course possible): Node A (in UNIX process 7066) with the ports ABC and DEF. And the node B (in UNIX process 8321) with the ports FOO and BAR.
|- PID: 7066 -| |- PID: 8321 -|
| | | |
| Node ID: A | | Node ID: B |
| | | |
| Port ABC =|= <----\ /-----> =|= Port FOO |
| | X | |
| Port DEF =|= <----/ \-----> =|= Port BAR |
| | | |
|-------------| |-------------|The strings for the port IDs here are just for illustrative purposes: Even though ports in AnyEvent::MP are also identified by strings, they can't be chosen manually and are assigned by the system dynamically. These port IDs are unique within a network and can also be used to identify senders, or even as message tags for instance.
The next sections will explain the API of AnyEvent::MP by going through a few simple examples. Later some more complex idioms are introduced, which are hopefully useful to solve some real world problems.
Passing Your First Message
For starters, let's have a look at the messaging API. The following example is just a demo to show the basic elements of message passing with AnyEvent::MP.
The example should print: Ending with: 123, in a rather complicated way, by passing some message to a port.
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::MP;
my $end_cv = AnyEvent->condvar;
my $port = port;
rcv $port, test => sub {
my ($data) = @_;
$end_cv->send ($data);
};
snd $port, test => 123;
print "Ending with: " . $end_cv->recv . "\n";It already uses most of the essential functions inside AnyEvent::MP: First there is the port function which creates a port and will return it's port ID, a simple string.
This port ID can be used to send messages to the port and install handlers to receive messages on the port. Since it is a simple string it can be safely passed to other nodes in the network when you want to refer to that specific port (usually used for RPC, where you need to tell the other end which port to send the reply to - messages in AnyEvent::MP have a destination, but no source).
The next function is rcv:
rcv $port, test => sub { ... };It installs a receiver callback on the port that specified as the first argument (it only works for "local" ports, i.e. ports created on the same node). The next argument, in this example test, specifies a tag to match. This means that whenever a message with the first element being the string test is received, the callback is called with the remaining parts of that message.
Messages can be sent with the snd function, which is used like this in the example above:
snd $port, test => 123;This will send the message 'test', 123 to the port with the port ID stored in $port. Since in this case the receiver has a tag match on test it will call the callback with the first argument being the number 123.
The callback is a typical AnyEvent idiom: the callback just passes that number on to the condition variable $end_cv which will then pass the value to the print. Condition variables are out of the scope of this tutorial and not often used with ports, so please consult the AnyEvent::Intro about them.
Passing messages inside just one process is boring. Before we can move on and do interprocess message passing we first have to make sure some things have been set up correctly for our nodes to talk to each other.
System Requirements and System Setup
Before we can start with real IPC we have to make sure some things work on your system.
First we have to setup a shared secret: for two AnyEvent::MP nodes to be able to communicate with each other over the network it is necessary to setup the same shared secret for both of them, so they can prove their trustworthyness to each other.
The easiest way is to set this up is to use the aemp utility:
aemp gensecretThis creates a $HOME/.perl-anyevent-mp config file and generates a random shared secret. You can copy this file to any other system and then communicate over the network (via TCP) with it. You can also select your own shared secret (aemp setsecret) and for increased security requirements you can even create (or configure) a TLS certificate (aemp gencert), causing connections to not just be securely authenticated, but also to be encrypted and protected against tinkering.
Connections will only be successfully established when the nodes that want to connect to each other have the same shared secret (or successfully verify the TLS certificate of the other side, in which case no shared secret is required).
If something does not work as expected, and for example tcpdump shows that the connections are closed almost immediately, you should make sure that ~/.perl-anyevent-mp is the same on all hosts/user accounts that you try to connect with each other!
Thats is all for now, you will find some more advanced fiddling with the aemp utility later.
Shooting the Trouble
Sometimes things go wrong, and AnyEvent::MP, being a professional module, does not gratuitously spill out messages to your screen.
To help troubleshooting any issues, there are two environment variables that you can set. The first, AE_VERBOSE sets the logging level of AnyEvent::Log, which AnyEvent::MP uses. The default is 4, which means nothing much is printed. You can increase it to 8 or 9 to get more verbose output. This is example output when starting a node (somewhat abridged to get shorter lines):
2012-03-22 01:41:43.59 debug AE::Util: using Guard module to implement guards.
2012-03-22 01:41:43.62 debug AE::MP::Kernel: node cerebro/slwK2LEq7O starting up.
2012-03-22 01:41:43.62 debug AE::MP::Kernel: node listens on [10.0.0.1:52110].
2012-03-22 01:41:43.62 trace AE::MP::Kernel: trying connect to seed node 10.0.0.19:4040.
2012-03-22 01:41:43.66 trace AE::MP::Transport: 10.0.0.19:4040 connected as rain.
2012-03-22 01:41:43.66 info AE::MP::Kernel: rain is up.A lot of info, but at least you can see that it does something. To only get info about AnyEvent::MP, you can use AE_LOG=AnyEvent::MP=+log in your environment.
The other environment variable that can be useful is AE_MP_TRACE, which, when set to a true value, will cause most messages that are sent or received to be printed. For example, aemp restart rijk might output these message exchanges:
SND rijk <- [null,"eval","AnyEvent::Watchdog::Util::restart; ()","aemp/cerebro/z4kUPp2JT4#b"]
SND rain <- [null,"g_slave",{"'l":{"aemp/cerebro/z4kUPp2JT4":["10.0.0.1:48168"]}}]
SND rain <- [null,"g_find","rijk"]
RCV rain -> ["","g_found","rijk",["10.0.0.23:4040"]]
RCV rijk -> ["b",""]PART 1: Passing Messages Between Processes
The Receiver
Lets split the previous example up into two programs: one that contains the sender and one for the receiver. First the receiver application, in full:
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::MP;
configure nodeid => "eg_receiver/%u", binds => ["*:4040"];
my $port = port;
db_set eg_receivers => $port;
rcv $port, test => sub {
my ($data, $reply_port) = @_;
print "Received data: " . $data . "\n";
};
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;Now, that wasn't too bad, was it? OK, let's go through the new functions that have been used.
configure and Joining and Maintaining the Network
First let's have a look at configure:
configure nodeid => "eg_receiver/%u", binds => ["*:4040"];Before we are able to send messages to other nodes we have to configure the node to become a "networked node". Configuring a node means naming the node and binding some TCP listeners so that other nodes can contact it. The choice on whether a process becomes a networked node or not must be done before doing anything else with AnyEvent::MP.
Additionally, to actually link all nodes in a network together, you should specify a number of seed addresses, which will be used by the node to connect itself into an existing network, as we will see shortly.
All of this info (and more) can be passed to the configure function - later we will see how we can do all this without even passing anything to configure!
Back to the function call in the program: the first parameter, nodeid, specified the node ID (in this case eg_receiver/%u - the default is to use the node name of the current host plus /%u, which gives the node a name with a random suffix to make it unique, but for this example we want the node to have a bit more personality, and name it eg_receiver with a random suffix.
Why the random suffix? Node IDs need to be unique within the network and appending a random suffix is the easiest way to do that.
The second parameter, binds, specifies a list of address:port pairs to bind TCP listeners on. The special "address" of * means to bind on every local IP address (this might not work on every OS, so explicit IP addresses are best).
The reason to bind on a TCP port is not just that other nodes can connect to us: if no binds are specified, the node will still bind on a dynamic port on all local addresses - but in this case we won't know the port, and cannot tell other nodes to connect to it as seed node.
Now, a seed is simply the TCP address of some other node in the network, often the same string as used for the binds parameter of the other node. The need for seeds is easy to explain: somehow the nodes of an aemp network have to find each other, and often this means over the internet. So broadcasts are out.
Instead, a node usually specifies the addresses of one or few (for redundancy) other nodes, some of which should be up. Two nodes can set each other as seeds without any issues. You could even specify all nodes as seeds for all nodes, for total redundancy. But the common case is to have some more or less central, stable servers running seed services for other nodes.
All you need to do to ensure that an AnyEvent::MP network connects together is to make sure that all seed nodes are connected together via their seed connections, i.e., all connections from seed nodes to their seed nodes form a connected graph.
A node tries to keep connections open to all of it's seed nodes at all times, while other connections are made on demand only.
The simplest way to do that would be for all nodes to use the same seed nodes: seed nodes would seed each other, and all other nodes would connect to the seed nodes.
All of this ensures that the network stays one network - even if all the nodes in one half of the net are separated from the nodes in the other half by some network problem, once that is over, they will eventually become a single network again.
In addition to creating the network, a node also expects the seed nodes to run the shared database service - if need be, by automatically starting it, so you don't normally need to configure this explicitly.
The process of joining a network takes time, during which the node is already running. This means it takes time until the node is fully connected, and information about services in the network are available. This is why most AnyEvent::MP programs either just register themselves in the database and wait to be "found" by others, or they start to monitor the database until some nodes of the required type show up.
We will see how this is done later, in the sender program.
Registering the Receiver
Coming back to our example, after the node has been configured for network access, it is time to publish some service, namely the receive service.
For that, let's look at the next lines:
my $port = port;
db_set eg_receivers => $port;The port function has already been discussed. It simply creates a new port and returns the port ID. The db_set function, however, is new: The first argument is the name of a database family and the second argument is the name of a subkey within that family. The third argument would be the value to be associated with the family and subkey, but, since it is missing, it will simply be undef.
What is a "family" you wonder? Well, AnyEvent::MP comes with a distributed database. This database runs on so-called "global" nodes, which usually are the seed nodes of your network. The database structure is "simply" a hash of hashes of values.
To illustrate this with Perl syntax, assume the database was stored in %DB, then the db_set function more or less would do this:
$DB{eg_receivers}{$port} = undef;So the ominous "family" selects a hash in the database, and the "subkey" is simply the key in this hash - db_set very much works like this assignment.
The family namespace is shared by all nodes in a network, so the names should be reasonably unique, for example, they could start with the name of your module, or the name of the program, using your port name or node name as subkey.
The purpose behind adding this key to the database is that the sender can look it up and find our port. We will shortly see how.
The last step in the example is to set up a receiver callback for those messages, just as was discussed in the first example. We again match for the tag test. The difference is that this time we don't exit the application after receiving the first message. Instead we continue to wait for new messages indefinitely.
The Sender
OK, now let's take a look at the sender code:
use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::MP;
configure nodeid => "eg_sender/%u", seeds => ["*:4040"];
my $guard = db_mon eg_receivers => sub {
my ($family, $a, $c, $d) = @_;
return unless %$family;
# now there are some receivers, send them a message
snd $_ => test => time
for keys %$family;
};
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;It's even less code. The configure serves the same purpose as in the receiver, but instead of specifying binds we specify a list of seeds - the only seed happens to be the same as the bind used by the receiver, which therefore becomes our seed node.
Remember the part about having to wait till things become available? Well, after configure returns, nothing has been done yet - the node is not connected to the network, knows nothing about the database contents, and it can take ages (for a computer :) for this situation to change.
Therefore, the sender waits, in this case by using the db_mon function. This function registers an interest in a specific database family (in this case eg_receivers). Each time something inside the family changes (a key is added, changed or deleted), it will call our callback with the family hash as first argument, and the list of keys as second argument.
The callback only checks whether the %$family hash is empty - if it is, then it doesn't do anything. But eventually the family will contain the port subkey we set in the sender. Then it will send a message to it (and any other receiver in the same family). Likewise, should the receiver go away and come back, or should another receiver come up, it will again send a message to all of them.
You can experiment by having multiple receivers - you have to change the "binds" parameter in the receiver to the seeds used in the sender to start up additional receivers, but then you can start as many as you like. If you specify proper IP addresses for the seeds, you can even run them on different computers.
Each time you start the sender, it will send a message to all receivers it finds (you have to interrupt it manually afterwards).
Additional experiments you could try include using AE_MP_TRACE=1 to see which messages are exchanged, or starting the sender before the receiver and see how long it then takes to find the receiver.
Splitting Network Configuration and Application Code
OK, so far, this works reasonably well. In the real world, however, the person configuring your application to run on a specific network (the end user or network administrator) is often different to the person coding the application.
Or to put it differently: the arguments passed to configure are usually provided not by the programmer, but by whoever is deploying the program - even in the example above, we would like to be able to just start senders and receivers without having to patch the programs.
To make this easy, AnyEvent::MP supports a simple configuration database, using profiles, which can be managed using the aemp command-line utility (yes, this section is about the advanced tinkering mentioned before).
When you change both programs above to simply call
configure;then AnyEvent::MP tries to look up a profile using the current node name in its configuration database, falling back to some global default.
You can run "generic" nodes using the aemp utility as well, and we will exploit this in the following way: we configure a profile "seed" and run a node using it, whose sole purpose is to be a seed node for our example programs.
We bind the seed node to port 4040 on all interfaces:
aemp profile seed binds "*:4040"And we configure all nodes to use this as seed node (this only works when running on the same host, for multiple machines you would replace the * by the IP address or hostname of the node running the seed), by changing the global settings shared between all profiles:
aemp seeds "*:4040"Then we run the seed node:
aemp run profile seedAfter that, we can start as many other nodes as we want, and they will all use our generic seed node to discover each other. The reason we can start our existing programs even though they specify "incompatible" parameters to configure is that the configuration file (by default) takes precedence over any arguments passed to configure.
That's all for now - next we will teach you about monitoring by writing a simple chat client and server :)
PART 2: Monitoring, Supervising, Exception Handling and Recovery
That's a mouthful, so what does it mean? Our previous example is what one could call "very loosely coupled" - the sender doesn't care about whether there are any receivers, and the receivers do not care if there is any sender.
This can work fine for simple services, but most real-world applications want to ensure that the side they are expecting to be there is actually there. Going one step further: most bigger real-world applications even want to ensure that if some component is missing, or has crashed, it will still be there, by recovering and restarting the service.
AnyEvent::MP supports this by catching exceptions and network problems, and notifying interested parties of these.
Exceptions, Port Context, Network Errors and Monitors
Exceptions
Exceptions are handled on a per-port basis: all receive callbacks are executed in a special context, the so-called port-context: code that throws an otherwise uncaught exception will cause the port to be killed. Killed ports are destroyed automatically (killing ports is actually the only way to free ports).
Ports can be monitored, even from a different node and host, and when a port is killed, any entity monitoring it will be notified.
Here is a simple example:
use AnyEvent::MP;
# create a port, it always dies
my $port = port { die "oops" };
# monitor it
mon $port, sub {
warn "$port was killed (with reason @_)";
};
# now send it some message, causing it to die:
snd $port;
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;It first creates a port whose only action is to throw an exception, and the monitors it with the mon function. Afterwards it sends it a message, causing it to die and call the monitoring callback:
anon/6WmIpj.a was killed (with reason die oops at xxx line 5.) at xxx line 9.The callback was actually passed two arguments: die, to indicate it did throw an exception as opposed to, say, a network error, and the exception message itself.
What happens when a port is killed before we have a chance to monitor it? Granted, this is highly unlikely in our example, but when you program in a network this can easily happen due to races between nodes.
use AnyEvent::MP;
my $port = port { die "oops" };
snd $port;
mon $port, sub {
warn "$port was killed (with reason @_)";
};
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;This time we will get something else:
2012-03-21 00:50:36 <2> unmonitored local port fADb died with reason: die oops at - line 3.
anon/fADb was killed (with reason no_such_port cannot monitor nonexistent port)The first line is an error message that is printed when a port dies that isn't being monitored, because that is normally a bug. When later a mon is attempted, it is immediately killed, because the port is already gone. The kill reason is now no_such_port with some descriptive (we hope) error message.
As you probably suspect from these examples, the kill reason is usually some identifier as first argument and a human-readable error message as second argument - all kill reasons by AnyEvent::MP itself follow this pattern. But the kill reason can be anything: it is simply a list of values you can choose yourself. It can even be nothing (an empty list) - this is called a "normal" kill.
Apart from die'ing, you can kill ports manually using the kil function. Using the kil function will be treated like an error when a non-empty reason is specified:
kil $port, custom_error => "don't like your steenking face";And a normal kill without any reason arguments:
kil $port;By now you probably wonder what this "normal" kill business is: A common idiom is to not specify a callback to mon, but another port, such as $SELF:
mon $port, $SELF;This basically means "monitor $port and kill me when it crashes" - and the thing is, a "normal" kill does not count as a crash. This way you can easily link ports together and make them crash together on errors, while allowing you to remove a port silently when it has done it's job properly.
Port Context
Code runs in the so-called "port context". That means $SELF contains its own port ID and exceptions that the code throws will be caught.
Since AnyEvent::MP is event-based, it is not uncommon to register callbacks from within rcv handlers. As example, assume that the following port receive handler wants to die a second later, using after:
my $port = port {
after 1, sub { die "oops" };
};If you try this out, you would find it does not work - when the after callback is executed, it does not run in the port context anymore, so exceptions will not be caught.
For these cases, AnyEvent::MP exports a special "closure constructor" called psub, which works mostly like perl's built-in sub:
my $port = port {
after 1, psub { die "oops" };
};psub remembers the port context and returns a code reference. When the code reference is invoked, it will run the code block within the context that it was created in, so exception handling once more works as expected.
There is even a way to temporarily execute code in the context of some port, namely peval:
peval $port, sub {
# die'ing here will kil $port
};The peval function temporarily replaces $SELF by the given $port and then executes the given sub in a port context.
Network Errors and the AEMP Guarantee
Earlier we mentioned another important source of monitoring failures: network problems. When a node loses connection to another node, it will invoke all monitoring actions, just as if the port was killed, even if it is possible that the port is still happily alive on another node (not being able to talk to a node means we have no clue what's going on with it, it could be crashed, but also still running without knowing we lost the connection).
So another way to view monitors is: "notify me when some of my messages couldn't be delivered". AEMP has a guarantee about message delivery to a port: After starting a monitor, any message sent to a port will either be delivered, or, when it is lost, any further messages will also be lost until the monitoring action is invoked. After that, further messages might get delivered again.
This doesn't sound like a very big guarantee, but it is kind of the best you can get while staying sane: Specifically, it means that there will be no "holes" in the message sequence: all messages sent are delivered in order, without any of them missing in between, and when some were lost, you will be notified of that, so you can take recovery action.
And, obviously, the guarantee only works in the presence of correctly-working hardware, and no relevant bugs inside AEMP itself.
Supervising
OK, so how is this crashing-everything-stuff going to make applications more stable? Well, in fact, the goal is not really to make them more stable, but to make them more resilient against actual errors and crashes. And this is not done by crashing everything, but by crashing everything except a supervisor that then cleans up and sgtarts everything again.
A supervisor is simply some code that ensures that an application (or a part of it) is running, and if it crashes, is restarted properly. That is, it supervises a service by starting and restarting it, as necessary.
To show how to do all this we will create a simple chat server that can handle many chat clients. Both server and clients can be killed and restarted, and even crash, to some extent, without disturbing the chat functionality.
Chatting, the Resilient Way
Without further ado, here is the chat server (to run it, we assume the set-up explained earlier, with a separate aemp run seed node):
use common::sense;
use AnyEvent::MP;
configure;
my %clients;
sub msg {
print "relaying: $_[0]\n";
snd $_, $_[0]
for values %clients;
}
our $server = port;
rcv $server, join => sub {
my ($client, $nick) = @_;
$clients{$client} = $client;
mon $client, sub {
delete $clients{$client};
msg "$nick (quits, @_)";
};
msg "$nick (joins)";
};
rcv $server, privmsg => sub {
my ($nick, $msg) = @_;
msg "$nick: $msg";
};
db_set eg_chat_server => $server;
warn "server ready.\n";
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;Looks like a lot, but it is actually quite simple: after your usual preamble (this time we use common sense), we define a helper function that sends some message to every registered chat client:
sub msg {
print "relaying: $_[0]\n";
snd $_, $_[0]
for values %clients;
}The clients are stored in the hash %client. Then we define a server port and install two receivers on it, join, which is sent by clients to join the chat, and privmsg, that clients use to send actual chat messages.
join is most complicated. It expects the client port and the nickname to be passed in the message, and registers the client in %clients.
rcv $server, join => sub {
my ($client, $nick) = @_;
$clients{$client} = $client;The next step is to monitor the client. The monitoring action removes the client and sends a quit message with the error to all remaining clients.
mon $client, sub {
delete $clients{$client};
msg "$nick (quits, @_)";
};And finally, it creates a join message and sends it to all clients.
msg "$nick (joins)";
};The privmsg callback simply broadcasts the message to all clients:
rcv $server, privmsg => sub {
my ($nick, $msg) = @_;
msg "$nick: $msg";
};And finally, the server registers itself in the server group, so that clients can find it:
db_set eg_chat_server => $server;Well, well... and where is this supervisor stuff? Well... we cheated, it's not there. To not overcomplicate the example, we only put it into the..... CLIENT!
The Client, and a Supervisor!
Again, here is the client, including supervisor, which makes it a bit longer:
use common::sense;
use AnyEvent::MP;
my $nick = shift || "anonymous";
configure;
my ($client, $server);
sub server_connect {
my $db_mon;
$db_mon = db_mon eg_chat_server => sub {
return unless %{ $_[0] };
undef $db_mon;
print "\rconnecting...\n";
$client = port { print "\r \r@_\n> " };
mon $client, sub {
print "\rdisconnected @_\n";
&server_connect;
};
$server = (keys %{ $_[0] })[0];
snd $server, join => $client, $nick;
mon $server, $client;
};
}
server_connect;
my $w = AnyEvent->io (fh => 0, poll => 'r', cb => sub {
chomp (my $line = <STDIN>);
print "> ";
snd $server, privmsg => $nick, $line
if $server;
});
$| = 1;
print "> ";
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;The first thing the client does is to store the nick name (which is expected as the only command line argument) in $nick, for further usage.
The next relevant thing is... finally... the supervisor:
sub server_connect {
my $db_mon;
$db_mon = db_mon eg_chat_server => sub {
return unless %{ $_[0] };
undef $db_mon; # stop monitoringThis monitors the eg_chat_server database family. It waits until a chat server becomes available. When that happens, it "connects" to it by creating a client port that receives and prints chat messages, and monitoring it:
$client = port { print "\r \r@_\n> " };
mon $client, sub {
print "\rdisconnected @_\n";
&server_connect;
};If the client port dies (for whatever reason), the "supervisor" will start looking for a server again - the semantics of db_mon ensure that it will immediately find it if there is a server port.
After this, everything is ready: the client will send a join message with its local port to the server, and start monitoring it:
$server = (keys %{ $_[0] })[0];
snd $server, join => $client, $nick;
mon $server, $client;
}This second monitor will ensure that, when the server port crashes or goes away (e.g. due to network problems), the client port will be killed as well. This tells the user that the client was disconnected, and will then start to connect the server again.
The rest of the program deals with the boring details of actually invoking the supervisor function to start the whole client process and handle the actual terminal input, sending it to the server.
Now... the "supervisor" in this example is a bit of a cheat - it doesn't really clean up much (because the cleanup done by AnyEvent::MP suffices), and there isn't much of a restarting action either - if the server isn't there because it crashed, well, it isn't there.
In the real world, one would often add a timeout that would trigger when the server couldn't be found within some time limit, and then complain, or even try to start a new server. Or the supervisor would have to do some real cleanups, such as rolling back database transactions when the database thread crashes. For this simple chat server, however, this simple supervisor works fine. Hopefully future versions of AnyEvent::MP will offer some predefined supervisors, for now you will have to code it on your own.
You should now try to start the server and one or more clients in different terminal windows (and the seed node):
perl eg/chat_client nick1
perl eg/chat_client nick2
perl eg/chat_server
aemp run profile seedAnd then you can experiment with chatting, killing one or more clients, or stopping and restarting the server, to see the monitoring in action.
The crucial point you should understand from this example is that monitoring is usually symmetric: when you monitor some other port, potentially on another node, that other port usually should monitor you, too, so when the connection dies, both ports get killed, or at least both sides can take corrective action. Exceptions are "servers" that serve multiple clients at once and might only wish to clean up, and supervisors, who of course should not normally get killed (unless they, too, have a supervisor).
If you often think in object-oriented terms, then you can think of a port as an object: port is the constructor, the receive callbacks set by rcv act as methods, the kil function becomes the explicit destructor and mon installs a destructor hook. Unlike conventional object oriented programming, it can make sense to exchange port IDs more freely (for example, to monitor one port from another), because it is cheap to send port IDs over the network, and AnyEvent::MP blurs the distinction between local and remote ports.
Lastly, there is ample room for improvement in this example: the server should probably remember the nickname in the join handler instead of expecting it in every chat message, it should probably monitor itself, and the client should not try to send any messages unless a server is actually connected.
PART 3: TIMTOWTDI: Virtual Connections
The chat system developed in the previous sections is very "traditional" in a way: you start some server(s) and some clients statically and they start talking to each other.
Sometimes applications work more like "services": They can run on almost any node and even talk to copies of themselves on other nodes in case they are distributed. The AnyEvent::MP::Global service for example monitors nodes joining the network and sometimes even starts itself on other nodes.
One good way to design such services is to put them into a module and create "virtual connections" to other nodes. We call this the "bridge head" method, because you start by creating a remote port (the bridge head) and from that you start to bootstrap your application.
Since that sounds rather theoretical, let us redesign the chat server and client using this design method.
As usual, we start with the full program - here is the server:
use common::sense;
use AnyEvent::MP;
configure;
db_set eg_chat_server2 => $NODE;
my %clients;
sub msg {
print "relaying: $_[0]\n";
snd $_, $_[0]
for values %clients;
}
sub client_connect {
my ($client, $nick) = @_;
mon $client;
mon $client, psub {
delete $clients{$client};
msg "$nick (quits, @_)";
};
$clients{$client} = $client;
msg "$nick (joins)";
rcv $SELF, sub { msg "$nick: $_[0]" };
}
warn "server ready.\n";
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;It starts out not much different then the previous example, except that this time, we register the node port in the database and not a port we created - the clients only want to know which node the server should be running on, and there can only be one such server (or service) per node. In fact, the clients could also use some kind of election mechanism, to find the node with lowest node ID, or lowest load, or something like that.
The much more interesting difference to the previous server is that indeed no server port is created - the server consists only of code, and "does" nothing by itself. All it "does" is to define a function named client_connect, which expects a client port and a nick name as arguments. It then monitors the client port and binds a receive callback on $SELF, which expects messages that in turn are broadcast to all clients.
The two mon calls are a bit tricky - the first mon is a shorthand for mon $client, $SELF. The second does the normal "client has gone away" clean-up action.
The last line, the rcv $SELF, is a good hint that something interesting is going on. And indeed, when looking at the client code, you can see a new function, spawn: #todo#
use common::sense;
use AnyEvent::MP;
my $nick = shift;
configure;
$| = 1;
my $port = port;
my ($client, $server);
sub server_connect {
my $servernodes = grp_get "eg_chat_server2"
or return after 1, \&server_connect;
print "\rconnecting...\n";
$client = port { print "\r \r@_\n> " };
mon $client, sub {
print "\rdisconnected @_\n";
&server_connect;
};
$server = spawn $servernodes->[0], "::client_connect", $client, $nick;
mon $server, $client;
}
server_connect;
my $w = AnyEvent->io (fh => 0, poll => 'r', cb => sub {
chomp (my $line = <STDIN>);
print "> ";
snd $server, $line
if $server;
});
print "> ";
AnyEvent->condvar->recv;The client is quite similar to the previous one, but instead of contacting the server port (which no longer exists), it spawns (creates) a new the server port on node:
$server = spawn $servernodes->[0], "::client_connect", $client, $nick;
mon $server, $client;And of course the first thing after creating it is monitoring it.
Phew, let's go through this in slow motion: the spawn function creates a new port on a remote node and returns its port ID. After creating the port it calls a function on the remote node, passing any remaining arguments to it, and - most importantly - executes the function within the context of the new port, so it can be manipulated by referring to $SELF. The init function can reside in a module (actually it normally should reside in a module) - AnyEvent::MP will automatically load the module if the function isn't defined.
The spawn function returns immediately, which means you can instantly send messages to the port, long before the remote node has even heard of our request to create a port on it. In fact, the remote node might not even be running. Despite these troubling facts, everything should work just fine: if the node isn't running (or the init function throws an exception), then the monitor will trigger because the port doesn't exist.
If the spawn message gets delivered, but the monitoring message is not because of network problems (extremely unlikely, but monitoring, after all, is implemented by passing a message, and messages can get lost), then this connection loss will eventually trigger the monitoring action. On the remote node (which in return monitors the client) the port will also be cleaned up on connection loss. When the remote node comes up again and our monitoring message can be delivered, it will instantly fail because the port has been cleaned up in the meantime.
If your head is spinning by now, that's fine - just keep in mind, after creating a port using spawn, monitor it on the local node, and monitor "the other side" from the remote node, and all will be cleaned up just fine.
Services
Above it was mentioned that spawn automatically loads modules. This can be exploited in various useful ways.
Assume for a moment you put the server into a file called mymod/chatserver.pm reachable from the current directory. Then you could run a node there with:
aemp runThe other nodes could spawn the server by using mymod::chatserver::client_connect as init function - without any other configuration.
Likewise, when you have some service that starts automatically when loaded (similar to AnyEvent::MP::Global), then you can configure this service statically:
aemp profile mysrvnode services mymod::service::
aemp run profile mysrvnodeAnd the module will automatically be loaded in the node, as specifying a module name (with ::-suffix) will simply load the module, which is then free to do whatever it wants.
Of course, you can also do it in the much more standard way by writing a module (e.g. BK::Backend::IRC), installing it as part of a module distribution and then configure nodes. For example, if I wanted to run the Bummskraut IRC backend on a machine named "ruth", I could do this:
aemp profile ruth addservice BK::Backend::IRC::And any aemp run on that host will automatically have the Bummskraut IRC backend running.
There are plenty of possibilities you can use - it's all up to you how you structure your application.
PART 4: Coro::MP - selective receive
Not all problems lend themselves naturally to an event-based solution: sometimes things are easier if you can decide in what order you want to receive messages, regardless of the order in which they were sent.
In these cases, Coro::MP can provide a nice solution: instead of registering callbacks for each message type, Coro::MP attaches a (coro-) thread to a port. The thread can then opt to selectively receive messages it is interested in. Other messages are not lost, but queued, and can be received at a later time.
The Coro::MP module is not part of AnyEvent::MP, but a separate module. It is, however, tightly integrated into AnyEvent::MP - the ports it creates are fully compatible to AnyEvent::MP ports.
In fact, Coro::MP is more of an extension than a separate module: all functions exported by AnyEvent::MP are exported by it as well.
To illustrate how programing with Coro::MP looks like, consider the following (slightly contrived) example: Let's implement a server that accepts a (write_file =>, $port, $path) message with a (source) port and a filename, followed by as many (data => $port, $data) messages as required to fill the file, followed by an empty (data => $port) message.
The server only writes a single file at a time, other requests will stay in the queue until the current file has been finished.
Here is an example implementation that uses Coro::AIO and largely ignores error handling:
my $ioserver = port_async {
while () {
my ($tag, $port, $path) = get_cond;
$tag eq "write_file"
or die "only write_file messages expected";
my $fh = aio_open $path, O_WRONLY|O_CREAT, 0666
or die "$path: $!";
while () {
my (undef, undef, $data) = get_cond {
$_[0] eq "data" && $_[1] eq $port
} 5
or die "timeout waiting for data message from $port\n";
length $data or last;
aio_write $fh, undef, undef, $data, 0;
};
}
};
mon $ioserver, sub {
warn "ioserver was killed: @_\n";
}; Let's go through it, section by section.
my $ioserver = port_async {Ports can be created by attaching a thread to an existing port via rcv_async, or as in this example, by calling port_async with the code to execute as a thread. The async component comes from the fact that threads are created using the Coro::async function.
The thread runs in a normal port context (so $SELF is set). In addition, when the thread returns, it will be kil normally, i.e. without a reason argument.
while () {
my ($tag, $port, $path) = get_cond;
or die "only write_file messages expected";The thread is supposed to serve many file writes, which is why it executes in a loop. The first thing it does is fetch the next message, using get_cond, the "conditional message get". Without arguments, it merely fetches the next message from the queue, which must be a write_file message.
The message contains the $path to the file, which is then created:
my $fh = aio_open $path, O_WRONLY|O_CREAT, 0666
or die "$path: $!";Then we enter a loop again, to serve as many data messages as necessary:
while () {
my (undef, undef, $data) = get_cond {
$_[0] eq "data" && $_[1] eq $port
} 5
or die "timeout waiting for data message from $port\n";This time, the condition is not empty, but instead a code block: similarly to grep, the code block will be called with @_ set to each message in the queue, and it has to return whether it wants to receive the message or not.
In this case we are interested in data messages ($_[0] eq "data"), whose first element is the source port ($_[1] eq $port).
The condition must be this strict, as it is possible to receive both write_file messages and data messages from other ports while we handle the file writing.
The lone 5 argument at the end is a timeout - when no matching message is received within 5 seconds, we assume an error and die.
When an empty data message is received we are done and can close the file (which is done automatically as $fh goes out of scope):
length $data or last;Otherwise we need to write the data:
aio_write $fh, undef, undef, $data, 0;And that's basically it. Note that every port thread should have some kind of supervisor. In our case, the supervisor simply prints any error message:
mon $ioserver, sub {
warn "ioserver was killed: @_\n";
}; Here is a usage example:
port_async {
snd $ioserver, write_file => $SELF, "/tmp/unsafe";
snd $ioserver, data => $SELF, "abc\n";
snd $ioserver, data => $SELF, "def\n";
snd $ioserver, data => $SELF;
}; The messages are sent without any flow control or acknowledgement (feel free to improve). Also, the source port does not actually need to be a port - any unique ID will do - but port identifiers happen to be a simple source of network-wide unique IDs.
Apart from get_cond as seen above, there are other ways to receive messages. The write_file message above could also selectively be received using a get call:
my ($port, $path) = get "write_file";This is simpler, but when some other code part sends an unexpected message to the $ioserver it will stay in the queue forever. As a rule of thumb, every threaded port should have a "fetch next message unconditionally" somewhere, to avoid filling up the queue.
Finally, it is also possible to use more switch-like get_conds:
get_cond {
$_[0] eq "msg1" and return sub {
my (undef, @msg1_data) = @_;
...;
};
$_[0] eq "msg2" and return sub {
my (undef, @msg2_data) = @_;
...;
};
die "unexpected message $_[0] received";
};THE END
This is the end of this introduction, but hopefully not the end of your career as AEMP user. I hope the tutorial was enough to make the basic concepts clear. Keep in mind that distributed programming is not completely trivial, in fact, it's pretty complicated. We hope AEMP makes it simpler and will be useful to create exciting new applications.
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
Robin Redeker <elmex@ta-sa.org>
Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>