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From: Eric Wong <normalperson-rMlxZR9MS24@public.gmane.org>
To: rainbows-talk-GrnCvJ7WPxnNLxjTenLetw@public.gmane.org
Subject: [RFC] thread_timeout middleware safety
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:52:53 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110421225253.GA23446@dcvr.yhbt.net> (raw)

I've rewritten the code in rainbows.git so it's hopefully safe.  I would
very much appreciate an independent code review and comments.

Thread#raise is difficult to use, but I think I managed to use it safely
(at least for all MRI).

Unfortunately, I do not believe the way I implemented timeouts can be
used to implement timeout.rb in Ruby-core.  timeout.rb supports nesting
while this module does not support nesting.

I just pushed the below patch out to annotate all the internal behavior
to make life easier for potential reviewers.

The latest version of the file is here:
  http://bogomips.org/rainbows.git/plain/lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb
Or:
  git clone git://bogomips.org/rainbows.git
  cd rainbows
  $EDITOR lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb

>From f6471ed9cafe6e65e72fa9486ecdcc4b2f8d1373 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Eric Wong <normalperson-rMlxZR9MS24@public.gmane.org>
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:38:20 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] thread_timeout: annotate as much as possible

This should make code review easier.
---
 lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb |   92 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 1 files changed, 88 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb b/lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb
index 3d28daf..4f62aba 100644
--- a/lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb
+++ b/lib/rainbows/thread_timeout.rb
@@ -29,14 +29,35 @@ require 'thread'
 #
 # Timed-out requests will cause this middleware to return with a
 # "408 Request Timeout" response.
-
+#
+# == Caveats
+#
+# Badly-written C extensions may not be timed out.  Audit and fix
+# (or remove) those extensions before relying on this module.
+#
+# Do NOT, under any circumstances nest and load this in
+# the same middleware stack.  You may load this in parallel in the
+# same process completely independent middleware stacks, but DO NOT
+# load this twice so it nests.  Things will break!
+#
+# This will behave badly if system time is changed since Ruby
+# does not expose a monotonic clock for users, so don't change
+# the system time while this is running.  All servers should be
+# running ntpd anyways.
 class Rainbows::ThreadTimeout
 
   # :stopdoc:
+  #
+  # we subclass Exception to get rid of normal StandardError rescues
+  # in app-level code.  timeout.rb does something similar
   ExecutionExpired = Class.new(Exception)
-  NEVER = Time.at(0x7fffffff) # MRI 1.8 won't be usable in January, 2038
+
+  # The MRI 1.8 won't be usable in January 2038, we'll raise this
+  # when we eventually drop support for 1.8 (before 2038, hopefully)
+  NEVER = Time.at(0x7fffffff)
 
   def initialize(app, opts)
+    # @timeout must be Numeric since we add this to Time
     @timeout = opts[:timeout]
     Numeric === @timeout or
       raise TypeError, "timeout=#{@timeout.inspect} is not numeric"
@@ -48,56 +69,119 @@ class Rainbows::ThreadTimeout
       @threshold < 0 and @threshold += Rainbows.server.worker_connections
     end
     @app = app
+
+    # This is the main datastructure for communicating Threads eligible
+    # for expiration to the watchdog thread.  If the eligible thread
+    # completes its job before its expiration time, it will delete itself
+    # @active.  If the watchdog thread notices the thread is timed out,
+    # the watchdog thread will delete the thread from this hash as it
+    # raises the exception.
+    #
+    # key: Thread to be timed out
+    # value: Time of expiration
     @active = {}
+
+    # Protects all access to @active.  It is important since it also limits
+    # safe points for asynchronously raising exceptions.
     @lock = Mutex.new
+
+    # There is one long-running watchdog thread that watches @active and
+    # kills threads that have been running too long
+    # see start_watchdog
     @watchdog = nil
   end
 
+  # entry point for Rack middleware
   def call(env)
+    # Once we have this lock, we ensure two things:
+    # 1) there is only one watchdog thread started
+    # 2) we can't be killed once we have this lock, it's unlikely
+    #    to happen unless @timeout is really low and the machine
+    #    is very slow.
     @lock.lock
+
+    # we're dead if anything in the next two lines raises, but it's
+    # highly unlikely that they will, and anything such as NoMemoryError
+    # is hopeless and we might as well just die anyways.
+    # initialize guarantees @timeout will be Numeric
     start_watchdog(env) unless @watchdog
     @active[Thread.current] = Time.now + @timeout
+
     begin
+      # It is important to unlock inside this begin block
+      # Mutex#unlock really can't fail here since we did a successful
+      # Mutex#lock before
       @lock.unlock
+
+      # Once the Mutex was unlocked, we're open to Thread#raise from
+      # the watchdog process.  This is the main place we expect to receive
+      # Thread#raise.  @app is of course the next layer of the Rack
+      # application stack
       @app.call(env)
     ensure
+      # I's still possible to receive a Thread#raise here from
+      # the watchdog, but that's alright, the "rescue ExecutionExpired"
+      # line will catch that.
       @lock.synchronize { @active.delete(Thread.current) }
+      # Thread#raise no longer possible here
     end
     rescue ExecutionExpired
+      # If we got here, it's because the watchdog thread raised an exception
+      # here to kill us.  The watchdog uses @active.delete_if with a lock,
+      # so we guaranteed it's
       [ 408, { 'Content-Type' => 'text/plain', 'Content-Length' => '0' }, [] ]
   end
 
+  # The watchdog thread is the one that does the job of killing threads
+  # that have expired.
   def start_watchdog(env)
     @watchdog = Thread.new(env["rack.logger"]) do |logger|
       begin
         if @threshold
-          # "active.size" is atomic in MRI 1.8 and 1.9
+          # Hash#size is atomic in MRI 1.8 and 1.9 and we
+          # expect that from other implementations.
+          #
+          # Even without a memory barrier, sleep(@timeout) vs
+          # sleep(@timeout - time-for-SMP-to-synchronize-a-word)
+          # is too trivial to worry about here.
           sleep(@timeout) while @active.size < @threshold
         end
 
         next_expiry = NEVER
+
+        # We always lock access to @active, so we can't kill threads
+        # that are about to release themselves from the eye of the
+        # watchdog thread.
         @lock.synchronize do
           now = Time.now
           @active.delete_if do |thread, expire_at|
+            # We also use this loop to get the maximum possible time to
+            # sleep for if we're not killing the thread.
             if expire_at > now
               next_expiry = expire_at if next_expiry > expire_at
               false
             else
+              # Terminate execution and delete this from the @active
               thread.raise(ExecutionExpired)
               true
             end
           end
         end
 
+        # We always try to sleep as long as possible to avoid consuming
+        # resources from the app.  So that's the user-configured @timeout
+        # value.
         if next_expiry == NEVER
           sleep(@timeout)
         else
+          # sleep until the next known thread is about to expire.
           sec = next_expiry - Time.now
           sec > 0.0 ? sleep(sec) : Thread.pass # give other threads a chance
         end
       rescue => e
+        # just in case
         logger.error e
-      end while true
+      end while true # we run this forever
     end
   end
   # :startdoc:
-- 
Eric Wong
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                 reply	other threads:[~2011-04-21 23:03 UTC|newest]

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