There were several problems with rbt hashtable implementation:
1. Our internal hashing function returns uint64_t value, but it was
silently truncated to unsigned int in dns_name_hash() and
dns_name_fullhash() functions. As the SipHash 2-4 higher bits are
more random, we need to use the upper half of the return value.
2. The hashtable implementation in rbt.c was using modulo to pick the
slot number for the hash table. This has several problems because
modulo is: a) slow, b) oblivious to patterns in the input data. This
could lead to very uneven distribution of the hashed data in the
hashtable. Combined with the single-linked lists we use, it could
really hog-down the lookup and removal of the nodes from the rbt
tree[a]. The Fibonacci Hashing is much better fit for the hashtable
function here. For longer description, read "Fibonacci Hashing: The
Optimization that the World Forgot"[b] or just look at the Linux
kernel. Also this will make Diego very happy :).
3. The hashtable would rehash every time the number of nodes in the rbt
tree would exceed 3 * (hashtable size). The overcommit will make the
uneven distribution in the hashtable even worse, but the main problem
lies in the rehashing - every time the database grows beyond the
limit, each subsequent rehashing will be much slower. The mitigation
here is letting the rbt know how big the cache can grown and
pre-allocate the hashtable to be big enough to actually never need to
rehash. This will consume more memory at the start, but since the
size of the hashtable is capped to `1 << 32` (e.g. 4 mio entries), it
will only consume maximum of 32GB of memory for hashtable in the
worst case (and max-cache-size would need to be set to more than
4TB). Calling the dns_db_adjusthashsize() will also cap the maximum
size of the hashtable to the pre-computed number of bits, so it won't
try to consume more gigabytes of memory than available for the
database.
FIXME: What is the average size of the rbt node that gets hashed? I
chose the pagesize (4k) as initial value to precompute the size of
the hashtable, but the value is based on feeling and not any real
data.
For future work, there are more places where we use result of the hash
value modulo some small number and that would benefit from Fibonacci
Hashing to get better distribution.
Notes:
a. A doubly linked list should be used here to speedup the removal of
the entries from the hashtable.
b. https://probablydance.com/2018/06/16/fibonacci-hashing-the-optimization-that-the-world-forgot-or-a-better-alternative-to-integer-modulo/
Previously badcache used one single mutex for everything, which
was causing performance issues. Use one global rwlock for the whole
hashtable and per-bucket mutexes.
Also disable the semantic patch as the code needs tweaks here and there because
some destroy functions might not destroy the object and return early if the
object is still in use.
3943. [func] SERVFAIL responses can now be cached for a
limited time (configured by "servfail-ttl",
default 10 seconds, limit 30). This can reduce
the frequency of retries when an authoritative
server is known to be failing, e.g., due to
ongoing DNSSEC validation problems. [RT #21347]
