[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Salvia-1.0.0

[Bas van Dijk]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Sebastiaan Visser <sfvisser at cs.uu.nl> wrote:
> Straight from Zurihac: I'm very pleased to announce the 1.0.0 release of the Salvia web server.

Hoi Sebastiaan,

(switching to English) I discovered a major space-leak in
Network.Salvia.Impl.Server.start due to the use of threadmanager:

When a request handler is forked the threadmanager internally maps the
threadId to a status MVar. However when the request handler terminates
this association is not deleted from the internal Map. This results in
a major O(n) space-leak where n = the number of requests accepted.

This space-leak can be visualized when you heap-profile the
salvia-helloworld demo:

salvia-helloworld +RTS -hy

and perform some requests:

$ for ((a=0; a<10000; a++)); do curl -s -o /dev/null localhost:8080; done

You will then get the following heap profile which will clearly
highlight the linear space-leak:

http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~bas/salvia-helloworld_ORIGINAL_10000_requests.ps

I fixed it by replacing threadmanager by Control.Concurrent.Thread[1]
from Roel's and mines concurrent-extra. This module has the following
advantages over threadmanager:

* Simpler: We don't have the concept of a ThreadManager. So you don't
need to make one and pass it to fork and wait.

* More efficient: We don't keep an internal mapping from ThreadIds to
status MVars.

* Correct: threadmanager has a bug where it can potentially miss the
termination of a thread. It doesn't block asynchronous exceptions
before it forks the computation that will install the necessary
exception handler before executing the given action. We correctly
block asynchronous exceptions.

Besides these advantages we have the ability to get the return value
of the forked thread so you don't need a mutable variable.

Besides replacing threadmanager I now manually delete the threadId of
the request handler when it terminates.

When I repeat the heap-profile you will now see a nice constant heap-usage:

http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~bas/salvia-helloworld_NEW_10000_requests.ps

I don't know how to attach my git patch to this email so I just copied
my git repository to:

http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~bas/salvia/

I think you can just pull from there.

Groeten,

Bas

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/concurrent-extra/0.4/doc/html/Control-Concurrent-Thread.html