This is the version that will lead to the LTS 2.0. It includes a lot of internal changes and removal of a lot of basically unused, broken, or too ugly functionality.
Options deprecated in 1.0.x have been definitely removed.
From now on, all of the request plugins, need to be non-blocking. A new set of C/C++/Obj-C api have been added to help the user/developer writing non-blocking code in a safe way. Plugins like the RPC one have been rewritten using that new api, allowing you to use it with engines like Gevent or Coro::Anyevent The async mode has been rewritten to better cooperate with this new rule. More info can be found on :doc:`Async` The new async mode requires some form of coroutine/greenthread/suspend engine to correctly work. Again, check :doc:`Async`
The Perl/PSGI plugin is one of the most ancient in the uWSGI project, but used to not support the async mode in advanced ways.
Thanks to the new :doc:`Async` mode, a Coro::Anyevent (coroae) loop engine has been added.
To build it you need the Coro::Anyevent package (you can use cpanm to get it), then just add --coroae <n> to your options where <n> is the number of async cores to spawn.
We finally have a truly working JVM infrastructure in uWSGI 1.9. Check the new docs at :doc:`JVM` Improved :doc:`JWSGI` support is available as well as the new Clojure :doc:`Ring` plugin
The first Mono plugin attempt (in 2010) was a total failure. Now we have a new shining implementation.
Check docs here :doc:`Mono`
One of the most annoying task in writing uWSGI request plugins, was re-implementing the management of HTTP body reader every time.
The new non-blocking api added 3 simple generic C/C++/Obj-C functions to deal with it in a language independent way:
char *uwsgi_request_body_read(struct wsgi_request *wsgi_req, ssize_t hint, ssize_t *rlen);
char *uwsgi_request_body_readline(struct wsgi_request *wsgi_req, ssize_t hint, ssize_t *rlen);
void uwsgi_request_body_seek(struct wsgi_request *wsgi_req, off_t pos);they automatically manage post-buffering, non-blocking and upload progress.
All of the request plugins have been updated to the new api
All of the --socket protocol parsers have been rewritten to be faster (less syscall usage) and to use less memory. They are now more complex, but you should note (on loaded site) a reduced amount of syscalls per-request.
The SCGI protocol support has been added, while a NPH fastcgi mode (where the output is HTTP instead of cgi) has been implemented.
The FastCGI protocol now supports true sendfile() usage
The old behaviour of storing the request body for HTTP and FastCGI on a temp file, has been removed (unless you use post-buffering). This means you can now have upload progress with protocols other than uwsgi.
One of the most annoying problem with older uWSGI releases was the lack of ability to easily split request logs from error logs. You can now create a logger and map it only to request logging:
[uwsgi]
req-logger = syslog
...As an example you may want to send request logging to syslog and redis, and error log to mongodb (on the foo.bar collection):
[uwsgi]
req-logger = syslog
req-logger = redislog:127.0.0.1:6269
logger = mongodblog:127.0.0.1:9090,foo.bar
...Or just use (boring) files
[uwsgi]
req-logger = file:/tmp/reqlog
logger = file:/tmp/errlog
...When in lazy/lazy_apps mode, you can simply destroy a worker to force it to reload the application code.
A new reloading system named "chain reload", allows you to reload one worker at time (opposed to the standard way where all of the workers are destroyed in bulk)
Chain reloading can only be triggered via "touch": --touch-chain-reload <file>
Offloading appeared in uWSGI 1.4 and is one of the most loved features. In 1.9 we added a new engine: "write", that allows you to offload the write of files on disk. A general function api uwsgi.offload() is on work, to allow applications to access the offload engine. All of the uWSGI parts sending static files (including the language-specific implementations, like WSGI wsgi.file_wrapper) have been extended to automatically use offloading if available. This means you can use your Framework's way for serving static files, without losing too much performance and (more important) without blocking your workers.
uWSGI 1.9 received many improvements in static file serving.
You may want to check: :doc:`StaticFiles`
For syadmins one of the most interesting new features is the ability to use the uWSGI new generation cacheing (see below) to store request -> absolute_path mappings
The uWSGI caching subsystem has been completely rewritten to be a more general purpose in-memory key/value store. The old caching subsystem has been re-built on top of it, and is now more of a general "web caching" system. The new cache subsystem allows you to control all of the aspects of your memory store, from the hashing algorithm to the amount of blocks.
You can now have multiple caches per-instance (identified by name)
To create a cache just use the new --cache2 option
[uwsgi]
cache2 = name=mycache,items=100
cache2 = name=faster,items=200,hash=murmur2,keysize=100,blocksize=4096
cache2 = name=fslike,items=1000,keysize=256,bitmap=1,blocks=2000,blocksize=8192
...In this example we created 3 caches: mycache, faster and fslike.
The first one is a standard old-style, cache able to store 100 items of a maximum size of 64k with keys limited to 2048 bytes using djb33x hashing algorithm The second one use the murmur2 hashing algorithm, each key can be at most 1000 bytes, can store 200 items of max 4k The last one works like a filesystem, where each item can span over multiple blocks. That means, fslike cache can save lot of memory for boject of different size (but it will be slower than non-bitmap based caches)
The options you can specify in cache2 are the following:
name the name of the cache (must be unique) REQUIRED
items/max_items/maxitems set the max number of items the cache can store REQUIRED
blocksize set the size of a single block
blocks set the number of blocks (used only in bitmap mode)
hash set the hashing algorithm, currently supported: djbx33 and murmur2
hashsize/hash_size set the size of the hash table (default to 65536 items)
keysize/key_size set the max size of a key
store set the filename in which to persistent store the cache
store_sync/storesync set the frequency (in seconds) at which msync() is called to flush cache on disk (when in persistent mode)
node/nodes the new cache subsystem can send cache updates via udp packet. With this option you set one or more (separated with ;) udp addresses on which to send updates
sync set it to the address of a cache server. Its whole content will be copied in the new cache (use it for initial sync)
udp/udp_servers/udp_server/udpservers/udpserver bind to the specified udp addresses (separated with ;) listening for cache updates
bitmap enable botmap mode (set it to 1)
If you are asking yourself why such low-level tunings exists, you have to take in account that the new caching subsystem is used in lot of areas, so for different needs you may want different tuning. Just check :doc:`SSLScaling` for an example
The old --cache-server option has been removed. The threaded cache server added in 0.9.8 has been completed superseeded by the new non blocking infrastructure. If you load the "cache" plugin (enabled by default in monolithic build) a cache server will be available and managed by the workers.
Update docs are available here :doc:`Caching`
The Legion subsystem is a new whole addition to the uWSGI project. It has superseeded the old Clustering subsystem (which has been removed in 1.9). It implements a quorum system to manage shared resources in clustered environments. Docs are already available: :doc:`Legion`
uWSGI can be compiled on windows machines using the cygwin POSIX emulation system. The event subsystem uses simple poll() (mapped to select() on cygwin), while the lock engine uses windows mutexes. Albeit from our tests it looks pretty solid, we consider the porting still "experimental"
As well as the request body language-independent management, an exception management system has been added. Currently supported only in the Python and Ruby plugins, allows language-independent handling of exceptions cases (like reloading on a specific exception). The --catch-exception option has been improved to show lot of useful information. Just try it (in development !!!) Future development will allow automatic sending of exception to system like Sentry or Airbrake.
Exciting new features have been added to the SSL system and the HTTP router
SPDY support (currently only version 3) will get lot of users attention, but SNI subsystem is what sysadmins will love
Preliminary docs are available
Many users have started using the HTTP/HTTPS/SPDY router in production, so we started adding features to it. Remember this is ONLY a router/proxy, NO I/O is allowed, so you may not be able to throw away your old-good webserver.
The new options:
--http-keepalive enable HTTP/1.1 keepalive connections
--http-auto-chunked for backend response without content-length (or chunked encoding already enabled), transform the output in chunked mode to maintain keepalive connections
--http-auto-gzip automatically gzip content if uWSGI-Encoding header is set to gzip, but content size (Content-Length/Transfer-Encoding) and Content-Encoding are not specified
--http-websockets automatically detect websockets connections to put the request handler in raw mode
A new corerouter has been added, it works in the same way as the rawrouter one, but will terminate ssl connections. The sslrouter can use sni for implementing virtualhosting (using the --sslrouter-sni option)
20Tab S.r.l. (a company working on HTML5 browsers game) sponsored the development of a fast language-independent websockets api for uWSGI. The api is currently in very good shape (and maybe faster than any other implementation). Docs still need to be completed but you may want to check the following examples (a simple echo):
https://github.com/unbit/uwsgi/blob/master/tests/websockets_echo.pl (perl)
https://github.com/unbit/uwsgi/blob/master/tests/websockets_echo.py (python)
https://github.com/unbit/uwsgi/blob/master/tests/websockets_echo.ru (ruby)
The internal routing subsystem has been rewritten to be 'programmable'. You can see it as an apache mod_rewrite with steroids (and goto ;) Docs still need to be ported, but the new system allows you to modify/filter CGI vars and HTTP headers on the fly, as well as managing HTTP authentication and caching.
Updated docs here (still work in progress) :doc:`InternalRouting`
A new imperial monitor has been added allowing vassals to be governed over zeromq messages:
http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ImperialMonitors.html#zmq-zeromq
The stats server now exports all of the request variables of the currently running requests for each core, so it works in multithread mode too. This is a great way to inspect what your instance is doing and how it does it In the future, uwsgitop could be extended to show the currently running request in realtime.
Ping requests sent using nagios plugin will no longer be counted in apps request stats. This means that if application had --idle option enabled nagios pings will no longer prevent app from going to idle state, so starting with 1.9 --idle should be disabled when nagios plugin is used. Otherwise app may be put in idle state just before nagios ping request, when ping arrives it needs to wake from idle and this might take longer than ping timeout, causing nagios alerts.
- The --app option has been removed. To load applications on specific mountpoints use the --mount option
- The --static-offload-to-thread option has been removed. Use the more versatile --offload-threads
- The grunt mode has been removed. To accomplish the same behaviour just use threads or directly call fork() and uwsgi.disconnect()
- The send_message/recv_message api has been removed (use language-supplied functions)
We missed the timeline for a bunch of expected features:
- SPNEGO support, this is an internal routing instruction to implement SPNEGO authentication support
- Ruby 1.9 fibers support has been rewritten, but need tests
- Erlang support did not got required attention, very probably will be post-poned to 2.0
- Async sleep api is incomplete
- SPDY push is still not implemented
- RADIUS and LDAP internal routing instructions are unimplemented
- The channel subsystem (required for easy websockets communications) is still unimplemented
In addition to this we have issues that will be resolved in upcoming minor releases:
- the --lazy mode lost usefulness, now it is like --lazy-apps but with workers-reload only policy on SIGHUP
- it looks like the JVM does not cooperate well with coroutine engines, maybe we should add a check for it
- Solaris and Solaris-like systems did not get heavy testing
A number of users/developers helped during the 1.9 development cycle. We would like to make special thanks to:
Łukasz Mierzwa (fastrouters scalability tests)
Guido Berhoerster (making the internal routing the new skynet)
Riccardo Magliocchetti (static analysis)
André Cruz (HTTPS and gevent battle tests)
Mingli Yuan (Clojure/Ring support and test suite)