Broken pipe with own dict server. Timing issue?
Hi,
I have created my own dict server (proxy:[<dict path>]:<destination dict>) to access a proprietary database. The dict server basically creates a listing socket on a separate thread and then waits for incoming requests with accept(handle, NULL, 0). When a request comes in (i.e., when accept returns the accepted socket fd), the request is handed over to a handler thread (from a thread pool). The handler thread then read from the input.
The issue that I have is that if the read is done too fast after the accept, Dovecot reports a broken pipe:
dovecot: auth-worker(19904): Error: write(/usr/share/test-server/tmp/test-dict) failed: Broken pipe
This happens for almost all processes that try to access the dict server.
However If I add some sort of delay between the accept call and read (for example a sleep), everything works. No broken pipe even after testing with a large number of parallel requests for a long time. Somehow it looks like if the first read is done too fast, it takes a long time to read the data. During this time it looks like all other Dovecot processes are no longer able to connect and report the broken pipe. With the artificial delay, everything works ok and I can see that multiple incoming request are handled by multiple threads so it looks like Dovecot uses multiple auth worker processes. If however one connection hangs on the read it looks like no Dovecot proccess is able to connect
Any idea what might be causing the broken pipe in relation to timing of the read?
Kind regards,
Martijn
On 08 Apr 2016, at 11:08, martijn.list <martijn.list@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I have created my own dict server (proxy:[<dict path>]:<destination dict>) to access a proprietary database. The dict server basically creates a listing socket on a separate thread and then waits for incoming requests with accept(handle, NULL, 0). When a request comes in (i.e., when accept returns the accepted socket fd), the request is handed over to a handler thread (from a thread pool). The handler thread then read from the input.
The issue that I have is that if the read is done too fast after the accept, Dovecot reports a broken pipe:
dovecot: auth-worker(19904): Error: write(/usr/share/test-server/tmp/test-dict) failed: Broken pipe
That doesn't make much sense.. Broken pipe means that the other side disconnected the socket. A read wouldn't disconnect a socket no matter when it was done. I'd say that some bug in your code is causing the socket to be disconnected too early. stracing it might be helpful.
Oh, and apparently I remembered wrong and the passdb/userdb dict lookups are done via auth-workers, so you'd be getting a connection from each auth-worker. It would be just one connection per auth-worker process though. But they're disconnecting immediately after having finished the pending lookups.
On 04/08/2016 10:38 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 08 Apr 2016, at 11:08, martijn.list <martijn.list@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I have created my own dict server (proxy:[<dict path>]:<destination dict>) to access a proprietary database. The dict server basically creates a listing socket on a separate thread and then waits for incoming requests with accept(handle, NULL, 0). When a request comes in (i.e., when accept returns the accepted socket fd), the request is handed over to a handler thread (from a thread pool). The handler thread then read from the input.
The issue that I have is that if the read is done too fast after the accept, Dovecot reports a broken pipe:
dovecot: auth-worker(19904): Error: write(/usr/share/test-server/tmp/test-dict) failed: Broken pipe
That doesn't make much sense.. Broken pipe means that the other side disconnected the socket. A read wouldn't disconnect a socket no matter when it was done. I'd say that some bug in your code is causing the socket to be disconnected too early. stracing it might be helpful.
Yes my bad ... That's why I always assume the bugs are in my own code ;)
It turned out that the hello message was not always send in the same packet as the next line. Which is understandable. However it's not directly clear to me when you can assume that all data has been sent. Am I right to assume that there are always two lines which end with a newline?
Example:
H2\t0\t0\tname-of-pipe\nLshared/userdb/martijn.list@gmail.com\n
In other words can my service stop reading when two lines are received and close the connection?
It looks like there is not some sort of "END OF DATA" command.
Oh, and apparently I remembered wrong and the passdb/userdb dict lookups are done via auth-workers, so you'd be getting a connection from each auth-worker. It would be just one connection per auth-worker process though. But they're disconnecting immediately after having finished the pending lookups.
Yes I can confirm this. I added some really long delays to slow down the dict handling and multiple connections were established.
Kind regards,
Martijn
participants (2)
-
martijn.list
-
Timo Sirainen