cluster: Need a way to listen on a port *without* going through master

[isaacs]

Let's say you have 8 workers all listening on port 443 or port 80. Great.

Then, you have some sporadic bug. The bug report details show that it's on worker 5, and that worker is in some oddball state. The other workers are fine.

To try to reproduce the error, you have to have a way to make a request to the worker specifically. So, you can have the worker also listen on some specific port, like 10000 + worker.id, with the same connection listener.

However, it's a bit silly to have it request two handles from the master, when one of them is not shared with anything else.

[bnoordhuis]

However, it's a bit silly to have it request two handles from the master, when one of them is not shared with anything else.

Is that really an issue?

[isaacs]

Yes. I'm seeing some issues in production that went away when I made it only have a single server handle shared with the parent.

The problem is that the cluster master process seems to get confused about the worker's connected-ness status when it has two servers shared, and one of them closes. As a result, I had to call worker.disconnect() twice to get it to actually disconnect, and in the worker, even if I closed both servers, the master doesn't see it. It's a bit tricky to reproduce, so I'm still trying to track it down, but making the workers only share a single server made the problems go away.

This hacky workaround is suitable for now, but is pretty ugly:

// https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/3856
cluster.isWorker = false
cluster.isMaster = true
loneServer.listen(lonePort, function () {
  cluster.isMaster = false
  cluster.isWorker = true
  logger.info("Listening on %d", lonePort)
})

[bnoordhuis]

As a result, I had to call worker.disconnect() twice to get it to actually disconnect, and in the worker, even if I closed both servers, the master doesn't see it.

Okay, so this issue is really a feature request and a bug report. :-)

[piscisaureus]

I agree that we need this. Didn't we sort of agree upon

server.listen({port: 1234, shared: false})

?
I seem to remember something like this.

[isaacs]

@bnoordhuis This is that issue I said we already had when you brought this up yesterday.

Added to v0.12 milestone.

[rmg]

I may be wrong, but I don't think this is still a candidate for 0.12, is it? Just trying to trim down the milestone.

[trevnorris]

Fixed by 029cfc1.