[jcifs] Thread leak problem on connect timeout

[John Baker]

Mike,

We appreciate everyone is busy, with little time to find for free projects, so 
perhaps you may wish to consider opening up the cvs/svn tree to developers 
such as Data Shock and myself, in order to fix bugs/submit new features/etc.  
I am sure there are many people on the list who could contribute.


John

On Wednesday 01 July 2009 19:15:13 you wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Data Shock<datashock at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > I am using the JCIFS library to write files to a Samba server.  In my
> > implementation, the program checks a local directory for new files and
> > writes them to the Samba server.  If the connect fails, it will try again
> > after the next 30 seconds.
> >
> >
> > The problem is, I've found that if the server connect times out instead
> > of a fast failure, threads are orphaned and steadily pile up.  The reason
> > is that the connect itself doesn't timeout after 30 seconds, just the
> > thread that's waiting for the the connect.  The connect itself doesn't
> > time out for over 3 minutes.  The waiting thread simply orphans the
> > connecting thread and moves on.  Additionally, the original connecting
> > thread is still holding a lock, so all subsequent connect attempts must
> > wait for the first to fail before they can continue.  This results in a
> > steadily increasing number of threads.  Even though the original
> > connecting thread will eventually timeout and exit, the waiting threads
> > pile up faster.  This process will eventually exhaust the number of
> > available system file descriptors and/or memory.
> >
> >
> > Perhaps it was coded this way for backwards Java version compatibility,
> > but it would seem that a few things could be done to address the problem.
> >
> > The simplest may be to interrupt the connecting thread then join with it.
> >  However, I have read reports of Windows socket implementations not
> > handling interrupts in blocking IO but I don't know if that problem still
> > exists in more recent releases.
> >
> >
> > Another approach may be to update any TCP socket connect attempts to use:
> >
> > Socket socket = new Socket();
> > socket.connect(socketaddress, timeout);
> >
> >
> > Instead of the simple constructor approach.  The connect with timeout has
> > been available since Java 1.4.  I suppose this may be a Java
> > compatibility problem, however I have not found any JCIFS documentation
> > that specifies Java version compatibility.
>
> Ok, this looks like something worth fixing. I think using the 1.4
> timeout looks like the right track but I haven't really looked at the
> problem so I don't know. Aslo, unfortunately this is the sort of thing
> that could take a really long time to make it into the code since I
> don't really work on JCIFS for free or Free anymore. But I've added
> this to the TODO.
>
> Thanks for the report.
>
> Mike