This continues/fixes #6719.
`event_base_loopbreak` was not doing what I expected it to, at least in
libevent 2.0.21.
What I expected was that it sets a timeout, given that no other pending
events it would exit in N seconds. However, what it does was delay the
event loop exit with 10 seconds, even if nothing is pending.
Solve it in a different way: give the event loop thread time to exit
out of itself, and if it doesn't, send loopbreak.
This speeds up the RPC tests a lot, each exit incurred a 10 second
overhead, with this change there should be no shutdown overhead in the
common case and up to two seconds if the event loop is blocking.
As a bonus this breaks dependency on boost::thread_group, as the HTTP
server minds its own offspring.
The two timeouts for the server and client, are essentially different:
- In the case of the server it should be a lower value to avoid clients
clogging up connection slots
- In the case of the client it should be a high value to accomedate slow
responses from the server, for example for slow queries or when the
lock is contended
Split the options into `-rpcservertimeout` and `-rpcclienttimeout` with
respective defaults of 30 and 900.
Split StartHTTPServer into InitHTTPServer and StartHTTPServer to give
clients a window to register their handlers without race conditions.
Thanks @ajweiss for figuring this out.
Implement RPCTimerHandler for Qt RPC console, so that `walletpassphrase`
works with GUI and `-server=0`.
Also simplify HTTPEvent-related code by using boost::function directly.
- *Replace usage of boost::asio with [libevent2](http://libevent.org/)*.
boost::asio is not part of C++11, so unlike other boost there is no
forwards-compatibility reason to stick with it. Together with #4738 (convert
json_spirit to UniValue), this rids Bitcoin Core of the worst offenders with
regard to compile-time slowness.
- *Replace spit-and-duct-tape http server with evhttp*. Front-end http handling
is handled by libevent, a work queue (with configurable depth and parallelism)
is used to handle application requests.
- *Wrap HTTP request in C++ class*; this makes the application code mostly
HTTP-server-neutral
- *Refactor RPC to move all http-specific code to a separate file*.
Theoreticaly this can allow building without HTTP server but with another RPC
backend, e.g. Qt's debug console (currently not implemented) or future RPC
mechanisms people may want to use.
- *HTTP dispatch mechanism*; services (e.g., RPC, REST) register which URL
paths they want to handle.
By using a proven, high-performance asynchronous networking library (also used
by Tor) and HTTP server, problems such as #5674, #5655, #344 should be avoided.
What works? bitcoind, bitcoin-cli, bitcoin-qt. Unit tests and RPC/REST tests
pass. The aim for now is everything but SSL support.
Configuration options:
- `-rpcthreads`: repurposed as "number of work handler threads". Still
defaults to 4.
- `-rpcworkqueue`: maximum depth of work queue. When this is reached, new
requests will return a 500 Internal Error.
- `-rpctimeout`: inactivity time, in seconds, after which to disconnect a
client.
- `-debug=http`: low-level http activity logging
