doc/admin-guide/plugins/multiplexer.en.rst

.. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
   or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
   this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF
   licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
   "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
   WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
   License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under
   the License.

.. include:: ../../common.defs

.. highlight:: cpp
.. default-domain:: cpp
.. |Name| replace:: Multiplexer

|Name|
**********

|Name| is a remap plug-in that allows requests to certain origins to be multiplexed (i.e.,
duplicated and dispatched in parallel) to one or more other hosts.  The headers are copied into the
new requests as well as request bodies specified via Content-Length. Chunk encoded request bodies
are not supported for multiplexing, but they will pass through to the non-multiplexed origin.
Optionally POST and PUT requests can be skipped via ``pparam=proxy.config.multiplexer.skip_post_put=1``.

Description
===========

|Name| does the following for requests it is configured to multiplex:

#. Add the ``X-Multiplexer: original`` header into the client's request.
#. For each host in ``pparam`` of the remap rule:

   #. Copies the resulting request (POST bodies are copied via the :ref:`HTTP Transform <developer-plugins-http-transformations>` mechanism).
   #. Changes the ``Host`` header of the copy according to ``pparam`` from the remap rule.
   #. Changes ``X-Multiplexer`` header value to ``copy`` instead of ``original``.
   #. Asynchronously sends the copied request with :func:`TSHttpConnect`.
   #. The copied request with the specified host is then itself processed via :file:`remap.config`.

|Name| dispatches the requests in the background without blocking the original request. Multiplexed
responses are drained and discarded. Note that you will need :file:`remap.config` entries for the
multiplexed hosts. If no such rules exist, the plugin will internally receive the typical 404
response for the multiplexed request since a matching remap entry for the multiplexed host will not
be found, with the result that no request will be sent to that host. When creating the
:file:`remap.config` entries for the multiplexed hosts, be aware that the multiplexed requests will
be originated with the HTTP scheme (not HTTPS), and therefore the corresponding "from" URL of the
remap rule should be constructed with the ``http://`` scheme prefix. See the sample
:file:`remap.config` rules below for example |Name| entries.

A default ``1`` second timeout is configured when communicating with each of the hosts receiving the
multiplexed requests. This timeout can be overwritten via the ``multiplexer__timeout`` environment
variable representing how many nanoseconds to wait.

The ``multiplexer`` debug tag can be used for debugging purposes (see
:ts:cv:`proxy.config.diags.debug.tags`). While debugging, multiplexed requests and responses are
printed into the logs.

|Name| produces the following statistics consumed with ``traffic_ctl``:

*  failures: number of failed multiplexed requests
*  hits: number of successful multiplexed requests
*  requests: total number of multiplexed requests
*  time(avg): average time taken between multiplexed requests and their responses
*  timeouts: number of multiplexed requests which timed-out
*  size(avg): average size of multiplexed responses

Here are some example :file:`remap.config` configuration lines::

    map http://www.example.com/a http://www.example.com/ @plugin=multiplexer.so @pparam=host1.example.com
    map http://host1.example.com http://host1.example.com

    map http://www.example.com/b http://www.example.com/ @plugin=multiplexer.so @pparam=host2.example.com
    map http://host2.example.com https://host2.example.com

    map https://www.example.com/c https://www.example.com/ @plugin=multiplexer.so @pparam=host1.example.com @pparam=host2.example.com
    map http://www.example.com/d http://www.example.com/ @plugin=multiplexer.so @pparam=host1.example.com @pparam=host2.example.com @pparam=proxy.config.multiplexer.skip_post_put=1

#. The first entry will multiplex requests sent to ``http://www.example.com`` with a path of ``/a``
   to ``host1.example.com``. The ``host1.example.com`` remap rule specifies that the multiplexed
   requests to ``host1`` will be sent over HTTP.
#. The second entry will multiplex requests sent to ``http://www.example.com`` with a path of ``/b``
   to ``host2.example.com``. The ``host2.example.com`` remap rule specifies that the multiplexed
   requests to ``host2`` will be sent over HTTPS.
#. The third entry will multiplex HTTPS requests sent to ``https://www.example.com`` with a path of
   ``/c`` to both ``host1.example.com`` and ``host2.example.com``.
#. The fourth entry will multiplex requests sent to ``http://www.example.com`` with a path of ``/d``
   to both ``host1.example.com`` and ``host2.example.com``, but POST and PUT requests will
   not be multiplexed.