Treat the no-error case the same as the error case...
- use the standard sendAction to communicate with the actor, which
ensures that we don't block when the actor has terminated
- run in a goroutine to prevent delaying the caller when the actor's
channel is backed up.
The only slight trickiness is Shutdown. Generally connections shut
down when an error is encountered, but we also need to be able to shut
down connections w/o an error. Rather than making all the actor
methods return a (terminated bool, error) tuple, we signal the
non-error shutdown by sending nil as the action (instead of a
closure).
Introduce an intermediary - GossipSender - between GossipChannel and
Connection. This accumulates gossip data (now represented by the new
GossipData interface) from the former until it can be passed onto the
latter, allowing the former to proceed when the latter may be blocked
on i/o.
This
1) prevents deadlocks that arise from cycles in the communication
topology
2) improves performance by allowing GossipChannel and its calling code
to proceed when connection i/o is blocked
3) improves performance by accumulating GossipData - the accumulated
data often is considerably more compact than the sum of all the
accumulated bits, and it is transmitted in a single communication
event.
In order to support accumulation, the GossipData interface has a Merge
method. Furthermore, encoding is deferred until the data can actually
be sent, since accumulation would be hard/impossible to encoded
data. This required changes on some interfaces, most notably Gossiper.
The implementation of GossipData for topology gossip is
TopologyGossipData. It carries a reference to Peers and a set of
PeerNames, indexing into Peers and referencing the Peer entries which
have changed. Previously updates were represented as a list of Peer
entries. The indirection via PeerNames allows Encode to omit entries
which have been removed. The change in representation required changes
to the signature of some methods on Peers.
Note that all the above only applies to the "periodic gossip" portion
of the Gossiper API, which topology gossip in fact uses for *all*
gossip. GossipUnicast and GossipBroadcast are unchanged, but could
conceivably receive the same treatment in the future.
Fixes#445.
Adam Harrison