We ran into the following deadlock:
- some command creates an ssh peer, then raises without explicitly closing the peer (hg id + extension in our case)
- dispatch catches the exception, calls ui.log('commandfinish', ..) (the sshpeer is still not closed), which calls logtoprocess, which calls procutil.runbgcommand.
- in the child of runbgcommand's fork(), between the fork and the exec, the opening of file descriptors triggers a gc which runs the destructor for sshpeer, which waits on ssh's stderr being closed, which never happens since ssh's stderr is held open by the parent of the fork where said destructor hasn't run
Remotefilelog appears to have a hack around this deadlock as well.
I don't know if there's more subtlety to it, because even though the
problem is determistic, it is very fragile, so I didn't manage to
reduce it.
I can imagine three ways of tackling this problem:
- don't run any python between fork and exec in runbgcommand
- make the finalizer harmless after the fork
- close the peer without relying on gc behavior
This commit goes with 1, as forking without exec'ing is tricky in
general in a language with gc finalizers. And maybe it's better in the
presence of rust threads. A future commit will try 2 or 3.
Performance wise: at low memory usage, it's an improvement. At higher
memory usage, it's about 2x faster than before when ensurestart=True,
but 2x slower when ensurestart=False. Not sure if that matters. The
reason for that last bit is that the subprocess.Popen always waits for
the execve to finish, and at high memory usage, execve is slow because
it deallocates the large page table. Numbers and script:
before after
mem=1.0GB, ensurestart=True 52.1ms 26.0ms
mem=1.0GB, ensurestart=False 14.7ms 26.0ms
mem=0.5GB, ensurestart=True 23.2ms 11.2ms
mem=0.5GB, ensurestart=False 6.2ms 11.3ms
mem=0.2GB, ensurestart=True 15.7ms 7.4ms
mem=0.2GB, ensurestart=False 4.3ms 8.1ms
mem=0.0GB, ensurestart=True 2.3ms 0.7ms
mem=0.0GB, ensurestart=False 0.8ms 0.8ms
import time
for memsize in [1_000_000_000, 500_000_000, 250_000_000, 0]:
mem = 'a' * memsize
for ensurestart in [True, False]:
now = time.time()
n = 100
for i in range(n):
procutil.runbgcommand([b'true'], {}, ensurestart=ensurestart)
after = time.time()
ms = (after - now) / float(n) * 1000
print(f'mem={memsize / 1e9:.1f}GB, ensurestart={ensurestart} -> {ms:.1f}ms')