Since essentially the first use of Tornado in Zulip, we've been
maintaining our Tornado+Django system, AsyncDjangoHandler, with
several hundred lines of Django code copied into it.
The goal for that code was simple: We wanted a way to use our Django
middleware (for code sharing reasons) inside a Tornado process (since
we wanted to use Tornado for our async events system).
As part of the Django 2.2.x upgrade, I looked at upgrading this
implementation to be based off modern Django, and it's definitely
possible to do that:
* Continue forking load_middleware to save response middleware.
* Continue manually running the Django response middleware.
* Continue working out a hack involving copying all of _get_response
to change a couple lines allowing us our Tornado code to not
actually return the Django HttpResponse so we can long-poll. The
previous hack of returning None stopped being viable with the Django 2.2
MiddlewareMixin.__call__ implementation.
But I decided to take this opportunity to look at trying to avoid
copying material Django code, and there is a way to do it:
* Replace RespondAsynchronously with a response.asynchronous attribute
on the HttpResponse; this allows Django to run its normal plumbing
happily in a way that should be stable over time, and then we
proceed to discard the response inside the Tornado `get()` method to
implement long-polling. (Better yet might be raising an
exception?). This lets us eliminate maintaining a patched copy of
_get_response.
* Removing the @asynchronous decorator, which didn't add anything now
that we only have one API endpoint backend (with two frontend call
points) that could call into this. Combined with the last bullet,
this lets us remove a significant hack from our
never_cache_responses function.
* Calling the normal Django `get_response` method from zulip_finish
after creating a duplicate request to process, rather than writing
totally custom code to do that. This lets us eliminate maintaining
a patched copy of Django's load_middleware.
* Adding detailed comments explaining how this is supposed to work,
what problems we encounter, and how we solve various problems, which
is critical to being able to modify this code in the future.
A key advantage of these changes is that the exact same code should
work on Django 1.11, Django 2.2, and Django 3.x, because we're no
longer copying large blocks of core Django code and thus should be
much less vulnerable to refactors.
There may be a modest performance downside, in that we now run both
request and response middleware twice when longpolling (once for the
request we discard). We may be able to avoid the expensive part of
it, Zulip's own request/response middleware, with a bit of additional
custom code to save work for requests where we're planning to discard
the response. Profiling will be important to understanding what's
worth doing here.
This fixes a bug where our asynchronous requests were only copying the
Content-Type header (i.e. the one case where we're noticed) from the
Django HttpResponse. I'm not sure what the impact of this would be;
the rate-limiting headers rarely come up when breaking a long-polled
request. But it seems clearly an improvement to do this in a
consistent fashion.
Only the headers piece is a change; in Tornado
self.finish(x)
is equivalent to:
self.write(x)
self.finish()
Previous cleanups (mostly the removals of Python __future__ imports)
were done in a way that introduced leading newlines. Delete leading
newlines from all files, except static/assets/zulip-emoji/NOTICE,
which is a verbatim copy of the Apache 2.0 license.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulipchat.com>
Previously, these timer accounting functions could be easily mistaken
for referring to starting/stopping the request. By adding timer to
the name, we make the code easier for the casual observer to read and
understand.
We're never going to add tests for this block, which is fundamentally
well-tested code from Django with a since line changed which is hard
to screw up (long-polling will not work at all without it). The hope
is to remove it entirely and replace it with a cleaner monkey-patch,
but until then, unit tests for it would be redundant.
Tim Abbott
Anders Kaseorg
Wyatt Hoodes
Vishnu Ks
neiljp (Neil Pilgrim)
rht
Umair Khan
Aditya Bansal
sinwar
Raghav Jajodia
Sidhant Bhavnani