What are the problems in 3-way Message passing Reliable IPC protocol? - operating-system

Here, at the end of this page. last paragraph ,
They mentioned some problems that occurs in This protocol.
i am unable to understand what are these problems. ?
for example. He told. "If a request processing long time"
I am unable to understand this statement. Where is the request which processing taking long time, on client ? or on server ?
Or i am unable to understand where is the Clock(time) ? is it on Client side or Server Side? because here mentioned in the end of 2 point. "if the reply is not received within the time period , the kernel of the client machine re-transmits the request message."

Consider this:
The client sends a message. If it doesn't get a reply from the server within - say - 1 minute it will transmit the message again.
When the server receives a message, it only sends a reply after having generated a full response to the message that the client sent.
No suppose you, as client, send a message to the server. The server receives your message, and starts processing it. At this time, you, the client, have no idea of whether the server got the message or not. Assume you send a complicated task to the server, which takes it 1 minute and 5 seconds to complete. After 1 minute (ignoring transmission times), the server is still busy doing your work, but you as the client don't know of any of this and send your message again.
Now, depending on the actual protocol implementation, there are a few potential issues:
It's possible that by sending the message again, you increase some sequence count and are therefore unable to receive the reply to the original message afterwards.
It's possible that the server isn't able to determine whether a message that arrives is the first message or a message that had to be send again. So it could be doing work that it already did, leading either to needless processing or in the worst case to (business) logic errors.
Additionally, by sending both the message and the reply possibly needless more than once, you increase the amount of total data transmitted, without gaining anything from it.
To "solve" this, you could increase the waiting time before the client sends its message again. This will "fix" the issue with long running tasks on the server, but will also hurt in case the message actually got lost on the way, because you're waiting longer to even send a new message.
The "real" solution here is to have the server acknowledge as soon as it receives a message from the client, just as saying "i got your message, i'll send the reply soon!" before even starting to actually process the message.

Related

What happens if a ResendRequest gets lost or the initiator is not able to answer it?

Consider the following sequence diagram which depicts the communication between a FIX initiator and the acceptor. Please note I am refering to FIX.4.4 here.
As you can see the message with sequence number 2 gets lost in transit. The initiator sends another message (with seq. number 3), the acceptor detects that gap and issues a resend request, asking again for message with seq. number 2 and everything that might have followed (7=2|16=0).
A couple of questions that I couldn't get answered by digging through the spec:
What happens if the "Resend Request" gets lost in transit?
What happens if the initiator is not able to resend the requested messages?
What happens if the "Resend Request" gets lost in transit?
The gap will be detected on the subsequent message just as you lined out.
However, the ResendRequest will not actually be resent because the only session-level message that must be resent is the Reject message.
Instead, either a SequenceReset with 123/GapFillFlag=Y (description) will be sent or the message will be skipped with a SequenceReset message with 36/NewSeqNo set to a higher sequence number, effectively skipping the message that will not be resent.
This is stated in the FIX spec in chapter "message recovery" (link)
What happens if the initiator is not able to resend the requested
messages?
As stated above it should either send a GapFill instead, or skip to a higher sequence number.

What is the flow of a request to a server with a queue in the middle?

I'm trying very hard to understand the flow of a web request to a server which has a queue or message broker in the middle, but I can't find information about when and where the reply is given.
Imagine this use case:
Client A:
sends a invoice order request
the invoice is enqueued
the request is processed and dequeued.
at which time the client will receive a response?
right after the message is received by the queue?
right after the message is processed and dequeued? Other?
I'm asking because if the reply only comes after the message being processed the client might wait a long time. Imagine the message takes 3 minutes to process, would the client need to keep requesting the server to see if it is processed? or a connection is maintained using something like long polling?
I'm interested in scenarios using RabbitMq and kafka.
Advantage of having a messaging system is to ensure the frontend webserver and backend processing is decoupled. Best practice is Web server should publish the message and just wait for the messaging system to acknowledge receiving the message.

How to check if Siebel has successfully delivered an email?

We send a lot of email messages from our Siebel 7.8 application, and we'd like to determine whether they have been successfully delivered or not.
According to the Bookshelf, if the SMTP server is down, the Communications Outbound Manager retries to send the message later, so that's not a problem. However, there are still plenty of issues which could cause an email to not be delivered, such as a typo in the address, the receiver having reached its storage quota, etc.
We send our messages this way:
var ps = TheApplication().NewPropertySet();
ps.SetProperty("ActivityId", outboundEmailActivityId);
ps.SetProperty("CommProfile", commProfile);
ps.SetProperty("ProcessMode", "Local");
var bs = TheApplication().GetService("Outbound Communications Manager");
bs.InvokeMethod("SendMessage", ps, psOut);
Using ProcessMode = Local allows us to detect a few errors. For example, if we try to send a message to a non-existant account in the same domain of our SMTP server, it returns 550 Unknown user and then 503 Must have sender and recipient first. The Outbound Communications Manager raises an exception, and we capture and handle it.
However, if we send a message to a non-existant account in a different domain, our SMTP server can't know that it will fail, and therefore it returns 250 Queued, and our code completes successfully. Later (it can range from seconds to a few hours later), we will receive a "Message undeliverable" error message, but at this point we only know that an outbound message failed, we don't know which one.
Is there any way in which Siebel can handle these 'Message undeliverable' notifications automatically?
We are thinking of writing our own process for that, but it seems like a huge task: we'd have to parse the delivery failure notification, identify the failing recipient, search for all the recent messages sent to that address, and somehow, guess which one failed (based on the Message-Id if we are lucky and can read it within Siebel, or on the Subject otherwise).
The problem is that SMTP is by its nature neither a synchronous nor reliable protocol (i.e. in the sense of "engineered for guaranteed delivery"). Your Siebel app server will connect to its assigned SMTP server and ask it to accept a message for delivery and at that time there are a few high level validations that can be perform (some of which you've mentioned but which can also include policy enforcement such as checking whether your (possibly anonymous) identity is authorized for relaying messages to external domains). Once that conversation ends, there is not much else you can reliably do because again, everything from that point is asynchronous and not guaranteed for delivery (any number of intermediate relay agents can be involved, each with their own potential for outages with or without retry, each with the ability to honor or ignore requests for delivery or read receipts or to report invalid recipients, throwing your message in a junk folder or not, etc.). Certainly you can attempt to work with any bounce notifications you do happen to get to try to correlate them back to the sender but that would be outside the context of your sending code.

Quickfix engine - does it persist messages before the start time on the server side

If a quick fix session is created by server(acceptor) at say 9AM, but the StartTime is at 11AM. This means the session exists but not active.
If the server receives an unsolicited message from an exchange that it needs to send on this session, will it persist this if I have configuration PersistMessages=Y and sends it to the client(initiator) when it connects after 11AM?
No, it would not persist messages received before start time and would send you a reject message. The message will be rejected at the interface itself, message isn't handled. You would have to resend it to get a response.
QuickFIX does persist (but not send) messages before a session is connected. The sequence numbers are updated and when the session is connected and the first message is sent, the counterparty FIX engine will see the gap in the sequence numbers and request a resend. QuickFIX will then resend the persisted messages. However, depending on your QuickFIX configuration, the outgoing messages might be considered to be too old and rejected locally.
As I understand, these are kept to take into account timings under which corresponding exchange would accept the orders.
Application or its sub-modules do not need to maintain timings and take some action on closing the fix session. Rather, QuickFix shall automatically deactivate the session.
Persistence of the message or re-sesnding when the session becomes active does not look desirable to me.
You can rather maintain some kind of queue to buffer such messages in sending application, and send them only when the time matches with active session timings.
That's my thoughts, hope that helps.

What is better practice for error notification by email

This question is language independent.
I have an application that handles requests in a loop. During this loop for each request multiple actions are taken. These actions are sitting inside try / catch / log blocks.
I am now extending this to notify administrators of severe errors via email.
This is all very easy, except for one thing. We are relying on the client/s to implement their own email delivery redundancy, and I know from experience there will always be one client who just has one SMTP exchange server, and this is bound to go down from time to time.
So here is the dilemma:
Scenario 1 (don't handle the error during failed send) - when I send an email to admin and SMTP is down it will break the app (app will stop running, and additional loops will stop processing, because the error is unhandled) This means that the error reporting which was supposed to be beneficial to the app suddenly becomes the reason why 99/100 requests don't get processed because there was an issue with request 1.
Scenario 2 (handle the exception during failed send) - this means that I surround send code in try/catch/log blocks, great! the application processes all requests 99 of them, except one, but the admin now has no notification of this one error via email because when it tried to send SMTP was down, and that error was simply logged to the application log, the admin who doesn't check this log for days (even weeks) at a time now has no way to know that error took place.
So is there a win/win way to solve this problem or am I always going to be at a loss, and in the mercy of SMTP being up. Remember it is out of our scope to manage email server redundancy.
Extend scenario 2 to keep a record of which entries in the application log didn't get sent via email, and periodically poll this log for unsent entries and try to resend them - eventually the smtp service will be available again. (You might want to stop any resent errors from going back in the resend queue tho...)
I would suggest the "win-win" way would be to have a server admin who actually administrates the server, rather than one who is entirely unreachable when his mail server is down, and doesn't bother to check up on it afterwards to see if he missed any notifications.