Comment 2 for bug 2003189

Created attachment 38407
mod_proxy_hcheck: recover worker from error state

While we were in the process of enabling mod_proxy_hcheck on some of our apache2 nodes we encountered an unusual behavior: sometimes, after rebooting a backend, its worker status remains marked as "Init Err" (balancer manager) until another request is made to the backend, no matter how many health checks complete successfully.

The following list shows the sequence of events leading to the problem:

1. Watchdog triggers health check, request is successful; worker status is "Init Ok"
2. HTTP request to apache2 with unreachable backend (rebooting); status becomes "Init Err"
3. Watchdog triggers another health check, request is again successful because the backend recovered; worker status remains "Init Err"
4. same as 3
5. same as 4

The only way for the worker status to recover is to wait for "hcfails" unsuccessful health checks and then again for "hcpasses" requests to be completed or just wait for legitimate traffic to retry the failed worker, which may not happen for a long time for rarely used applications.

This was surprising to us since we were expecting the worker status to be recovered after "hcpasses" successful health checks; however this doesn't seem to happen when the error status is triggered by ordinary traffic to the backend (i.e not health checks).

We believe this behavior was accidentally introduced in r1725523. The patch we are proposing seems to fix the problem in our environment.