BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception

[Neil Mitchell]

> My understanding was that this error occurred when one thread was blocked,
> waiting on an MVar, and no other thread in the program has a reference to
> that MVar (this can be detected during GC).  Ergo, the blocked thread will
> end up waiting forever because no-one can ever wake it up again.

That certainly seems a sensible rule - I'll see if that can help me
debug my problem.

> Do you actually have use of MVars in your program directly, or are they
> being used via a library?  And do you at least know which thread is
> throwing this exception?  It should be catchable so you can probably wrap
> the arguments to your forkIO calls with a catcher than indicates which
> thread blew up.

I use MVar's directly, use Chan/QSem, and have about 5 concurrency
data types built on top of MVar's - they're everywhere.

I also have a thread pool structure, so tasks move between threads
regularly - knowing which thread got blocked isn't very interesting.

Thanks for the information,

Neil