This change blocks off 2 common scenarios where a race condition is
upgraded to a hang, when the library could internally do better.
* Since we don't know whether the receiver of a `reply_to` is expecting
a raw or pickled message, and since in the case of a raw reply, there
is no way to signal "dead" to the receiver, override the reply_to
field to explicitly mark a message as dead using a special handle.
This replaces the serialized _DEAD sentinel value with a slightly
neater interface, in the form of the reserved IS_DEAD handle, and
enables an important subsequent change: when a context cannot route a
message, it can send a generic 'dead' reply back towards the message
source, ensuring any sleeping thread is woken with ChannelError.
The use of this field could potentially be extended later on if
additional flags are needed, but for now this seems to suffice.
* Teach Router._invoke() to reply with a dead message when it receives a
message for an invalid local handle.
* Teach Router._async_route() to reply with a dead message when it
receives an unroutable message.
This permits graceful shutdown of individual contexts, without tearing
down everything.
Update mitogen.parent.Stream to also wait for the child to exit, to
prevent the buildup of zombie processes. This introduces a blocking wait
for process exit on the Broker thread, let's see if we can get away with
it. Chances are reasonable that it'll cause needless hangs on heavily
loaded machines.
The Context and Router APIs for constructing children and making
function calls should be available in every parent context, as user code
wants to have access to the same API.
Using the same test as in 7af97c0365,
transmitted wire bytes drops from 135,531 to 133,071 (-1.81%), while
received drops from 21,073 to 14,775 (-30%).
Combined, both changes shave 13,914 bytes (-8.6%) off aggregate
bandwidth usage.
Make it configurable as compression hurts in some scenarios.
David Wilson