hundreds of polling requests

julian

Ah, I stand corrected, then. Unfortunate. Have you tried incapsula? They have a free plan, but I honestly do not know if they proxy websockets on their free plan as well.

exodo

@julian incapsula only support websockets on enterprise plans (same as cloudfare), they confirmed it to me by contact support.
cloudfare reveals ip on grey cloud for sure

TheBronx

@zack is right about Incapsula. And long polling also works pretty bad.
We will have to try without CF and without nginx to debug each part individually.

Thanks for the help guys.

julian

The site works with xhr-polling, to my knowledge. We had a client using xhr-polling for awhile, with no loss of functionality...

There are many ajax requests, yes, but that is the nature of long polling, no? Then again there shouldn't be multiple calls per second... just one or two every 10s or so...

markkus

Perhaps there can be something done with SRV records (for spoofing IP)? As far as I'm concerned, when your DNS record has "grey clouds" in CloudFlare, it directs to your IP directly.

julian

Some more thoughts on the issue:

When you don't have websockets working, we drop down to xhr polling (as established prior).
To establish a secure connection, socket.io goes through a multi-stage handshake to exchange information
If you are utilising multiple NodeBB processes, separate parts of the handshake can end up going to different processes, and the handshake is lost.

@markkus @TheBronx Can you try reducing the number of ports used by NodeBB to just 1, and see if the issue persists? I have a feeling it will not, though of course, this is not a solution...

TheBronx

@julian you are right, when setting only one instance, long polling works as expected. It only uses one request at a time, that gets an answer soon or late, but it no longer uses 4 or 5 request at the same time. there are also no 400 errors.

we have to go back to multiple instances, of course, but it seems you have found something. is there anything we can do to make nginx redirect all requests from the same IP (or user) to the same nodebb instance? this should help, am I wrong?

by the way, we have tried with a secondary server (we still have to fix some issues), and we have found that the wiki is wrong about the socketio configuration:
it says you have to create a block in config.json like:
"socketio": { ... }
when it should say:
"socket.io": { ... }
notice the dot xD

<baris>

@TheBronx Yes you should use the ip_hash; directive and redirect the clients to the same nodebb instance based on IP.

julian

@baris This would help if you only had one NodeBB process per ip, but I think if you had multiple, then each process uses its own in-memory space for socket.io handshaking, right?

Seems this is the problem.

julian

The solution for this problem (in addition to using ip_hash, that is) as suggested online seems to be to use the sticky-sessions module, although NodeBB actually doesn't use the cluster module, so this is not an applicable solution unless we rewrite the load balancing code in loader.js to use Node.js' cluster module again.

KingCat

@TheBronx Have you tried setting up a page rule to disable acceleration, caching, and apps? That way you can still use the WAF and be hidden behind the CloudFlare IP but maybe web sockets will work better...

exodo

That wont work as cf dont dupport websocket on lower plans, no matjer if you disable catching, etc

@julian just tried websockets with a second server with another nodebb instance and the socket.io from the main server with cloudfare refering that second ip.
It works but it doesnt let to login or post.
How do you share "cookies" or logged in status between that 2 node instances?

julian

After discussion with @baris, I was mistaken about NodeBB's role with cluster management.

We rely purely on nginx (or apache) to forward the incoming requests to the correct NodeBB instance. If NodeBB is set up to listen to two ports, it will start two instances, but will not do any routing.

So, @TheBronx @KingCat @zack, you'll have to set up your environment as follows:

Domain Name -> CloudFlare -> Nginx -> NodeBB x2 (assuming ports 4567 and 4568).

Nginx will need to proxy to the upstream IP (even if it is the same machine), so you'll need to use an upstream block like so:

upstream io_nodes {
    ip_hash;
    server 127.0.0.1:4567;
    server 127.0.0.1:4568;
}

The ip_hash; part is important, so incoming IP addresses are sent to the same server during handshaking.

Long polling should work fine then.

exodo

@julian said:

After discussion with @baris, I was mistaken about NodeBB's role with cluster management.

We rely purely on nginx (or apache) to forward the incoming requests to the correct NodeBB instance. If NodeBB is set up to listen to two ports, it will start two instances, but will not do any routing.

So, @TheBronx @KingCat @zack, you'll have to set up your environment as follows:

Domain Name -> CloudFlare -> Nginx -> NodeBB x2 (assuming ports 4567 and 4568).

Nginx will need to proxy to the upstream IP (even if it is the same machine), so you'll need to use an upstream block like so:
upstream io_nodes {
    ip_hash;
    server 127.0.0.1:4567;
    server 127.0.0.1:4568;
}
The ip_hash; part is important, so incoming IP addresses are sent to the same server during handshaking.

Long polling should work fine then.

not sure how to do this
how you run 2 instances of node with same domain?

pichalite

@zack https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/scaling/index.html

exodo

@julian our config is exact the one you told us on last post. We have it that way from the begining so that wont solve the problem

exodo

@julian said:

After discussion with @baris, I was mistaken about NodeBB's role with cluster management.

We rely purely on nginx (or apache) to forward the incoming requests to the correct NodeBB instance. If NodeBB is set up to listen to two ports, it will start two instances, but will not do any routing.

So, @TheBronx @KingCat @zack, you'll have to set up your environment as follows:

Domain Name -> CloudFlare -> Nginx -> NodeBB x2 (assuming ports 4567 and 4568).

Nginx will need to proxy to the upstream IP (even if it is the same machine), so you'll need to use an upstream block like so:
upstream io_nodes {
    ip_hash;
    server 127.0.0.1:4567;
    server 127.0.0.1:4568;
}
The ip_hash; part is important, so incoming IP addresses are sent to the same server during handshaking.

Long polling should work fine then.

i can confirm the hundreds of polling request its not a ws issue
tried it with this info

   "socket.io": {
        "transports" : ["polling"]
   }

so it only uses polling
i put only one port so will run one instance and will be ok, no error on console

but if you put several posts

"port": ["4567", "4568", "4569", "4570"],

with proxy on nginx

server {
        listen 80;

        server_name yournodebb.com;

        location / {
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;

            proxy_pass http://io_nodes;
            proxy_redirect off;

            # Socket.IO Support
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        }
    }
    
    upstream io_nodes {
        ip_hash;
        server 127.0.0.1:4567;
        server 127.0.0.1:4568;
        server 127.0.0.1:4569;
        server 127.0.0.1:4570;
    }

then you will get many request x second , notice domain isn't ws.exo.do and its only exo.do cause it's not running with web sockets.

Captura de pantalla 2015-05-07 a las 17.33.39.png

julian

@zack Thanks for giving it a try Odd why the ip_hash directive isn't doing what it's supposed to. What nginx version are you running?

Are you using CloudFlare as well? You'll need to translate those IPs properly, as when going through CF, the requesting IP is actually one from CF's network, not the end user.

exodo

@julian said:

@zack Thanks for giving it a try Odd why the ip_hash directive isn't doing what it's supposed to. What nginx version are you running?

Are you using CloudFlare as well? You'll need to translate those IPs properly, as when going through CF, the requesting IP is actually one from CF's network, not the end user.

nginx/1.1.19 + Cloudfare

pichalite

@zack NodeBB documentation states minimum nginx version as v1.3.13. May be upgrading nginx will solve the issue?

https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/configuring/proxies/nginx.html