Hello folks!
First huge thanks for this amazing project.
We actively rely on Apache APISIX at LINAGORA for our OIDC setup on top
of Apache James mail server. [1]
As part of this set up we need to check for invalidated sid in upcoming
tokens onto a Redis database.
We naturally wrote a Java plugin to do so.
Recently we encountered a Redis outage and to our horror HTTP requests
were violently throttled by the API gateway, and bypassing the faulty
Redis was taking way more time than the configured 100ms timeout.
Investigation showed that:
- Our Redis code inside our Apisix plugin was blocking
- That doing so was disastrous as the plugin code runs directly onto
the Netty event loop of the Unix socket linking the plugin to APisix
- That the Apisix Java programming API was async friendly with it's
PluginFilterChain abstraction
- But that very sadly the given PluginFilterChain was called
synchronously and expected to run synchronously
While I do believe better overall design exists, being able to query
external data source from within a Java plugin seems to be a pretty
common expectation for at least Java users [2].
With that new knowledge I:
- [3] Patched the LINAGORA back-channel logout plugin to be asynchronous
- [4] Proposed an evolution of the java plugin runner to call the
plugin chain in an async friendly way. This PR had been tested in our
dev environments (functionally logout still works, and timeouts are well
applied). We will further performance test this change and will roll it
over in production in the coming days.
- [5] Opened Github issue and [6] JIRA issue
I also do believe the threading model need to be clearly documented, and
the use case of asynchronous Java plugins can be made explicit. I
propose myself to write this doc.
Hope the Apisix community will like this special XMas gift.
Best regards,
Benoit TELLIER from the Apache James project.
[1]
https://github.com/linagora/tmail-backend/tree/master/demo/apisix/tmail-apisix-plugin-runner
[2] https://github.com/apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner/issues/264
https://github.com/apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner/issues/168
[3] https://github.com/linagora/tmail-backend/pull/1412
[4] https://github.com/apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner/pull/313
[5] https://github.com/apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner/issues/312
[6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/APISIX/issues/APISIX-38
