(Resending with proper subject…)

On 08 Jan 2015, at 20:48, squeak-dev-request@lists.squeakfoundation.org mailto:squeak-dev-request@lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:

From: "David T. Lewis" <lewis@mail.msen.com mailto:lewis@mail.msen.com> Subject: [squeak-dev] Re: [Vm-dev] [OSProcess] forking and file descriptors

On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 11:37:48AM +0100, Max Leske wrote:

...

Hi

We currently use ImageSegment to create snapshots of our object graphs. To ensure consistency (and for performance reasons) we create a fork of the image and then run the segment creation in the fork. We???ve always had minor issues with TCP sockets but they are pretty rare and have never corrupted any data (we close the TCP connections in the child).

Recently however, we created a new application which also makes heavy use of a database and now it seems that forking creates a real problem. In anticipation of possible problems I opted to destroy all sockets (with Socket>>destroy) in the fork, thinking that, since all file descriptors are copies of the ones in the parent process, the sockets in the parent process should be unaffected [1], [2]. With that mechanism in place however, we are seeing very weird things, such as multiples sockets in the parent (!) having the same file handle (which leads to the wrong data being read from the database and, in turn, corrupt objects).

AFAICT, the OSProcess plugin doesn???t offer any way of dealing with such problems so I was wondering if anybody has had any experience with these kinds of issues and whether there is some kind of best practice.

I am aware that the most simple option is to close the sockets in the parent before forking, but that will mean that we would have to wait for all database connections to finish executing, then blocking them to prevent new connections to the database. Depending on the time a query takes (which may well be a couple of seconds in our case) clients would need to wait for quite a long time before their request can be answered (and this scenario of course assumes that we only close the database sockets and leave the TCP sockets open???).

So under the condition that I need to fork that image, what is the best way to deal with open file descriptors?

Thanks for your time. Max

[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/fork.2.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/fork.2.html [2] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/clone.2.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/clone.2.html

The only file descriptor (socket or file) that is directly controlled by forkSqueak is the socket connection to the X11 display. That is done via the XDisplayControlPlugin. Everything else needs to be handled by the image (including the changes file BTW).

True, I’d never thought of that…

For connections such as those to a database, I think that you would want to maintain complete control of this in your image, such that you would ensure that you have one and only one of the images interacting with any given socket.

You can probably do this either before or after forking, whichever might make more sense to you. If you handle it after the forkSqueak, use the result of the forkSqueak to determine which image is the child and which is the parent.

That’s what I’m trying to do. The problem I face is that the database queries run in a separate process (Smalltalk process in the VM). Once I’m in the child process, there’s always a small window in which the scheduler might run that process before I can terminate it or do something else.

My understanding from the C code (from reading man fork(2) and man clone(2)) is that sending Socket>>destroy (which does a close()) shouldn’t have any effect on the socket in the parent. My guess is that things get hairy when the process with the database queries gets processor time before I can destroy the sockets. When that happens, I suddenly have two processes reading from AND writing to the same socket (which can’t be good…).

I just realized, there are BlockClosure>>valueUnpreemptively and BlockClosure>>valueUninterruptably. Maybe a can wrap the the code in the fork into such a block somehow to prevent the other processes from running?

Thanks Dave.

I don't know if this helps, if not please keep askng questions.

Dave