zulip/zerver/worker
Mateusz Mandera 06151672ba
queue: Use locking to avoid race conditions in missedmessage_emails.
This queue had a race condition with creation of another Timer while
maybe_send_batched_emails is still doing its work, which may cause
two or more threads to be running maybe_send_batched_emails
at the same time, mutating the shared data simultaneously.

Another less likely potential race condition was that
maybe_send_batched_emails after sending out its email, can call
ensure_timer(). If the consume function is run simultaneously
in the main thread, it will call ensure_timer() too, which,
given unfortunate timings, might lead to both calls setting a new Timer.

We add locking to the queue to avoid such race conditions.

Tested manually, by print debugging with the following setup:
1. Making handle_missedmessage_emails sleep 2 seconds for each email,
   and changed BATCH_DURATION to 1s to make the queue start working
   right after launching.
2. Putting a bunch of events in the queue.
3. ./manage.py process_queue --queue_name missedmessage_emails
4. Once maybe_send_batched_emails is called and while it's processing
the events, I pushed more events to the queue. That triggers the
consume() function and ensure_timer().

Before implementing the locking mechanism, this causes two threads
to run maybe_send_batched_emails at the same time, mutating each other's
shared data, causing a traceback such as

Exception in thread Thread-3:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/threading.py", line 916, in _bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/threading.py", line 1182, in run
    self.function(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
  File "/srv/zulip/zerver/worker/queue_processors.py", line 507, in maybe_send_batched_emails
    del self.events_by_recipient[user_profile_id]
KeyError: '5'

With the locking mechanism, things get handled as expected, and
ensure_timer() exits if it can't obtain the lock due to
maybe_send_batched_emails still working.

Co-authored-by: Tim Abbott <tabbott@zulip.com>
2020-08-26 12:40:59 -07:00
..
__init__.py
queue_processors.py queue: Use locking to avoid race conditions in missedmessage_emails. 2020-08-26 12:40:59 -07:00