ProcessReaper: single thread reaper (original) (raw)

Martin Buchholz martinrb at google.com
Wed Mar 26 17:54:36 UTC 2014

Peter and Roger, please stop going down this road until you have a solution for my show-stopper problem, that in the below you are reaping children that don't belong to java.lang.Process

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Peter Levart <peter.levart at gmail.com>wrote:

Hi Roger,

Your current implementation works for the demostrated use case in UNIXProcess, where a single call-back is registered for a pid. If you wanted to register another, the waitList and exitList might have already removed the pid from them as a result of the 1st call-back already been serviced before registering the 2nd one. So you might want to keep the entry in exitList for a while, to accommodate for 2nd and subsequent call-back registration if such usage is to be needed. This is what I tried to do in the following code: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~plevart/jdk9-dev/ProcessWaiter/webrev.01/ I leveraged ConcurrentHashMap and CompletableFuture for the task. As an example of usage in UNIXProcess, I modified the linux variant only. A single waiter thread is dispatching exit statuses from exited children to CompletableFutures. Various waitFor() etc. methods in UNIXProcess are implemented in terms of Future.get()/isDone() methods and clean-up is implemented by dispatching asynchronously a cleanup task to the thread pool, so that multiple threads can help draining buffers. Children that are collected by waiter thread but nobody has asked to be notified about get expunged from the map after a time-out. I haven't done any checking for live pids as you did in checkLiveness() because in current usage, a pid that registers a Future entry in the map is taken from a successful forkAndExec() call so it will definitely be collected by the waitLoop() when the child process exits. The only possibility that this does not happen is if the same pid was waited for somewhere else (not in the waitLoop()). So if this is to be supported, a scan of live pids will be necessary from time to time and not only when there're no unwaited children (suppose there is a long-lived child running indefinitely). What do you think? Regards, Peter

On 03/25/2014 10:47 PM, Roger Riggs wrote: Hi Martin, Two cases, one current and one future. In the current case, Process can spawn a process and the process can exit before Process can register the callback to get the exitValue. Peter pointed out this race in his comments. The exitValue needs to be saved (for some time yet to be determined) to allow the Process to register and get its callback with the exitValue. The second case is future looking to the case where a child process not spawned by Process is exiting. It might be due to a child being inherited from a dieing child or due to some different subprocess launcher. When the JEP 102 process work happens, it should be possible to wait or get called back for those non-spawned processes. The single (smaller) number of threads has been requested to handle processes that control a large number of children. It could be from a thread pool, either dedicated or common. The common threadpool does not expect its tasks to hang for an indefinite period as might occur when waiting for along running process to exit. Thanks, Roger On 3/25/14 2:39 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote: What happens if the pid you get back is a subprocess not created by ProcessBuilder? + pid = waitpid(-1, &exitValue, 0); --- What is the advantage of having a single thread? Are you just trying to save threads? The cost of the reaper threads is much lower than usual because of the small stack size. On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 7:05 AM, Peter Levart <peter.levart at gmail.com>wrote: On 03/24/2014 10:05 PM, roger riggs wrote: Hi Rob, Martin, et.al. I've prototyped (for 9) a thread reaper[1] that uses a single thread to wait for exiting processes and calling back to the process with the exit status. the interesting part is getting the exit status back to the Process that needs it It needs more testing and hardening. I had not considered using a signal handler for SIGCHLD but that's an option, though we need to be very careful about thread usage. Roger p.s. comments on the single thread reaper appreciated (in a new thread) [1] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rriggs/webrev-waitpid/

Hi Roger, I think I found a little race. Suppose reaper task is still alive and that all consumers have been serviced (consumerCount is 0). The reaper task waits for 500 millis for next consumer to be registered, but times out. Before calling "reaperThread.release()", new consumer comes around and registers itself, also calling runReaper(), but since reaperThread.release() has not yet been called by old reaper task, new reaper task is not submitted to commonPool. The old reaper task finishes, leaving one consumer on the waitingList with no reaper task to service it. If no new consumers get registered, the waiting consumer will never be notified... The simplest solution for this race, I think, would be to have a dedicated long-running thread. It could be spawned lazily, but then it would never finish. Otherwise a nice solution with two lists (exitList/waitList) and avoidance of race with reversed orders between - consumer registration: register on waitList 1st then check exitList, and - exit event dispatch: register on exitList 1st then check waitList ...but the check you use with consumeCount local variable to detect processes spawned by other means (for purposes of logging only) has a race: thread1: Suppose a new consumer is being registered with onExitCall(...), is added on the waitList, but before checking exitList().size() and iterating the exitList, ... thread2: the reaper task detects that the very same process has finished (gets it's pid from waitpid) and adds it's pid to exitList. Then before iterating waitList, ... thread1: iterates the exitList, finds a match and consumes the pid, removing the matching entries from both exitList and waitList. Then ... thread2: the reaper task iterates waitList, doesn't find a matching entry for exitPid, doesn't increment consumeCount and voila: debug log("Unexpected process exit for pid:..."). That's enough races for today. Regards, Peter

On 3/24/2014 12:38 AM, Rob McKenna wrote: Hi folks, Roger Riggs (cc'd) may want to chip in here as he's looking at the reaper thread arrangement in 9 at the moment. On another note, I too support the merging of those files. I didn't think there was much appetite for it at the time so I must admit this fell down my todo list. Looking at this bug did remind me that its something worth trying though. As per Alan's mail, I'm going to tackle it separately if you folks don't mind. I'll have a look at Peter's changes (thanks Peter!) as soon as I can and see about getting them in. -Rob On 23/03/14 22:30, Martin Buchholz wrote:

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 2:34 AM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>wrote: We have also thought about whether having reaper threads is necessary. The Unix rule is that child processes should be waited for, and some thread needs to do that. There's no way to wait for a set of child pids, or to specify a "completion handler". Well, you might be able to get the newish waitid() to do what you want, but it looks like it's not sufficient when java is running inside a process that might do independent subprocess creation outside of the JVM. Actually, I take it back. With sufficient work, it looks like you can get SIGCHLD to give you pid information in siginfot sipid, and that can be used to trigger the reaping. It looks like waitpid is "async-signal-safe", so we can call it from our signal handler. While we're at it we can fix SIGCHLD handling to do signal chaining, as with other signals.

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