Hello folks!
I am happy to announce that the new mainline version of ngx_openresty,
1.4.3.7, is now released:
http://openresty.org/#Download
Thanks all our contributors for making this happen!
The highlights of this release are the new LuaJIT v2.1 engine and the
lua-resty-core library.
You should observe immediate speedup in your existing OpenResty/Lua
apps after upgrading to this version. Sometimes the speedup can be 40%
overall, as observed in CloudFlare’s Lua WAF system. Sometimes it may
just be 10%, as observed in CloudFlare’s Lua CDN system. Thanks to all
the new improvements in LuaJIT v2.1, especially the improvements in
the JIT compiler; Mike Pall is my hero 
Special thanks go to
CloudFlare for kindly sponsoring 3 development phases in LuaJIT v2.1
(and phase #4 is also coming!).
The lua-resty-core library reimplements many Lua API functions
provided by the ngx_lua module with LuaJIT FFI, which means user Lua
code paths using these API functions can finally be JIT compiled by
LuaJIT (they used to be interpreted by LuaJIT’s interpreter only). So
enabling lua-resty-core like below in nginx.conf may give another
speedup in your Lua applications:
init_by_lua '
require "resty.core"
';
Loading the resty.core module will replace a lot of ngx_lua’s Lua API
functions with resty.core’s own FFI-based implementations. So you can
easily compare the performance with and without lua-resty-core 
Enabling lua-resty-core in CloudFlare’s Lua WAF system gives another
33% ~ 37% overall speedup. Whee!
But if your don’t have enough Lua code paths (actually) JIT compiled,
you MAY observe slowdown after enabling lua-resty-core. So always
benchmark the performance of your app before enabling lua-resty-core
in production. Or just resolve or workaround the blockers in your Lua
code paths that cannot be JIT compiled, with the aid of LuaJIT’s jit.v
or jit.dump modules. To use LuaJIT’s jit.v or jit.dump modules to
analyze your Lua apps running in OpenResty/Nginx, you can put the
following lines into your nginx.conf’s http {} block:
init_by_lua '
local verbose = false
if verbose then
local dump = require "jit.dump"
dump.on("b", "/tmp/jit.log")
else
local v = require "jit.v"
v.on("/tmp/jit.log")
end
require "resty.core"
';
And load your app with tools like ab and weighttp to get your Lua code
hot (for LuaJIT’s JIT compiler). Then you can check the outputs in the
file /tmp/jit.log for all the detailed information from the JIT
compiler.
Below is the complete change log for this release, as compared to the
last (stable) release, 1.4.3.6:
-
upgraded LuaJIT to v2.1-20131211.
- see changes here:
Commits · openresty/luajit2 · GitHub
- see changes here:
-
bundled LuaRestyCoreLibrary 0.0.2.
- this library reimplements LuaNginxModule’s Lua API with
LuaJIT FFI. see GitHub - openresty/lua-resty-core: New FFI-based API for lua-nginx-module
for more details.
- this library reimplements LuaNginxModule’s Lua API with
-
upgraded LuaNginxModule to 0.9.3.
-
feature: added a lot of pure C API (without using any Lua
VM’s C API) for FFI-based Lua API implementations like
LuaRestyCoreLibrary. -
feature: allow creating 0-delay timers upon worker process
existing. -
feature: added new API function ngx.worker.exiting() for
testing if the current worker process has started exiting. -
feature: ngx.re.find() now accepts the optional 5th argument
“nth” to control which submatch capture’s indexes are
returned. thanks Lance Li for the feature request. -
feature: added new API for version numbers of both Nginx and
LuaNginxModule itself: ngx.config.nginx_version and
ngx.config.ngx_lua_version. thanks smallfish for the patch. -
feature: added support for loading LuaJIT 2.1 bytecode files
directly in *_by_lua_file configuration directives. -
bugfix: ngx.req.set_header() did not completely override the
existing request header with multiple values. thanks Aviram
Cohen for the report. -
bugfix: modifying request headers in a subrequest could lead
to assertion failures and crashes. thanks leaf corcoran for
the report. -
bugfix: turning off lua_code_cache could lead to memory
issues (segfaults and LuaJIT assertion failures) when Lua
libraries using LuaJIT FFI were used. now we always create a
clean separate Lua VM instance for every Nginx request
served by us when the Lua code cache is disabled. thanks Ron
Gomes for the report. -
bugfix: the linker option “-E” is not support in Cygwin’s
linker; we should test “–export-all-symbols” at the same
time. thanks Heero Zhang for the report. -
bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
compiler. thanks Edwin Cleton for the report. -
optimize: optimized the implementation of ngx.headers_sent a
bit. -
doc: added new section “Statically Linking Pure Lua
Modules”:
GitHub - openresty/lua-nginx-module: Embed the Power of Lua into NGINX HTTP servers
inking-pure-lua-modules -
doc: typo fixes from Zheng Ping.
-
-
upgraded HeadersMoreNginxModule to 0.24.
- bugfix: more_set_input_headers did not completely override
the existing request header with multiple values. thanks
Aviram Cohen for the report.
- bugfix: more_set_input_headers did not completely override
-
upgraded SetMiscNginxModule to 0.23.
- feature: added new configuration directives
set_formatted_gmt_time and set_formatted_local_time. thanks
Trurl McByte for the patch.
- feature: added new configuration directives
-
upgraded MemcNginxModule to 0.14.
- feature: added new configuration directive
memc_ignore_client_abort. thanks Eldar Zaitov for the patch.
- feature: added new configuration directive
-
upgraded RdsJsonNginxModule to 0.13.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
compiler. thanks Edwin Cleton for the report.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
-
upgraded EchoNginxModule to 0.50.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
compiler. thanks Edwin Cleton for the report.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
-
upgraded ArrayVarNginxModule to 0.03.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
compiler. thanks Edwin Cleton for the report.
- bugfix: fixed the warnings from the Microsoft Visual C++
-
upgraded RedisNginxModule module to 0.3.7.
- see changes here:
http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2013-December/041297.html
- see changes here:
-
feature: applied the larger_max_error_str patch to the nginx
core to allow error log messages up to 4096 bytes and to allow
the C macro “NGX_MAX_ERROR_STR” to be overridden from the
outside. -
feature: added new configure option
“–with-pcre-conf-opt=OPTIONS” to the nginx core to allow custom
PCRE ./configure build options. thanks Lance Li for the original
patch.
The HTML version of the change log with lots of helpful hyper-links
can be browsed here:
http://openresty.org/#ChangeLog1004003
OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application
server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx
modules and Lua libraries, as well as most of their external
dependencies. See OpenResty’s homepage for details:
http://openresty.org/
We have run extensive testing on our Amazon EC2 test cluster and
ensured that all the components (including the Nginx core) play well
together. The latest test report can always be found here:
http://qa.openresty.org
Have fun!
-agentzh