Question regarding lifetime of PRIV_TASK pointer

[Lee Hambley]

Hi,

This is exaclty what we were looking for. Thank you sincerely.

Lee Hambley
http://lee.hambley.name/
+49 (0) 170 298 5667


On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 17:15, Guillaume Quintard <
guillaume.quintard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Lee,
>
> Looks like you had the right page, but missed the interesting part :-) In
> you
> https://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html#ref-vmod-private-pointers
> have this bit:
>
> > .fini will be called for a non-NULL .priv of the struct vmod_priv when
> the scope ends with that .priv pointer as its second argument besides a
> VRT_CTX.
>
> i.e. if your vmod_priv has a methods->fini pointer, it will be called
> when the vmod_priv is deleted.
>
> Was this what you were after, or did I misunderstand your question?
>
> --
> Guillaume Quintard
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 7:28 AM Lee Hambley <lee.hambley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear List,
>>
>> I inherited a project using PRIV_TASK [1] for which the documentation
>> says:
>>
>> PRIV_TASK “per task” private pointers are useful for state that applies
>> to calls for either a specific request or a backend request. For instance
>> this can be the result of a parsed cookie specific to a client. Note that
>> PRIV_TASK contexts are separate for the client side and the backend
>> side, so use in vcl_backend_* will yield a different private pointer
>> from the one used on the client side. These private pointers live only for
>> the duration of their task.
>>
>> We do a form of reference counting in our internal data structures, and
>> the PRIV_TASK pointer in parts is used to hold a (counted) reference to
>> some data in the shared structure.
>>
>> We are struggling to find the latest possible safest place to hook where
>> PRIV_TASK is about to be invalid (end of the request) so that we can
>> safely, and finally decrement the reference count and clean-up.
>>
>> Writing this out now, I suspect that there's a safe exit from the state
>> machine [2] where we could modify our VCL to include a call to a clean-up
>> function in our vmod, however it's not clear to me if this would be "safe"
>> (restarts, request coalescing, etc, etc)
>>
>> In short then, is there an obvious place into which we can hook which is
>> the place where Varnish is already about to discard the "task" and it is
>> unoquivically safe for us to decrement our reference counted pointer to the
>> PRIV_TASK referenced data?
>>
>> Thanks so much, very much enjoying being in a role hacking on Varnish,
>> and Varnish adjacent stuff in my job currently.
>>
>> [1]:
>> https://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html#ref-vmod-private-pointers
>> [2]:
>> https://www.varnish-software.com/developers/tutorials/varnish-configuration-language-vcl/#finite-state-machine
>>
>>
>> Lee Hambley
>> http://lee.hambley.name/
>> +49 (0) 170 298 5667
>> _______________________________________________
>> varnish-misc mailing list
>> varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
>> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/mailman/listinfo/varnish-misc
>>
>
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