I was wondering if you could terminate just the thread on which the node application is executing but NOT the process.
Now, I know this sounds strange, because node IS single-threaded, BUT I'm working on an .NET application that hosts node in-process. And when I terminate node with process.exit() the whole application gets closed, which is a behavior I don't want. I just want the node thread to get terminated.
Honestly I'm so desperate I even tried, getting a list of all application threads prior to creating the thread on which node is executing, and then another list after it's created, then removing all threads that were present prior to starting node, keeping a reference to the remaining thread, thinking it was the node thread. As you could expect this did not turn out so well.
I'm using EdgeJS to host node, if that makes any difference. It does not have a built in functionality to terminate itself, unfortunately.
Oh and server.close() doesn't work for me, for some reason.
I'm hosting a video streaming server in my node code, if that info can help you in any way.
Thanks for all the help in advance!
The node thread needs to co-operate by clearing everything that is running on the event loop and then it terminates naturally by returning. So just stop listening for requests, close handles etc. You can use process._getActiveRequests and process._getActiveHandles to see what is keeping the event loop alive.
You can also abruptly interrupt the node thread just by calling OS apis but this will leak a lot of garbage until you exit the process so you cannot start/restart node a lot of times before you need to exit the process anyway to free the leaked resources.
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Is there a possible way to stop/abort/terminate a required/loaded module?
I found here (https://stackoverflow.com/a/6677355/5781499) something:
var name = require.resolve('moduleName');
delete require.cache[name];
But this does not stop/abort a running timer or similar.
It just keeps doing what the script does.
The reason for me to need this, I want to implement a plugin system where you can start & stop plugins.
"Starting" is easy, just load with require(...) the code.
But what would be the best way to stop everything the plugin is doing?
I have though about a VM, but in node there is no way to abort either a vm execution.
Next thing that came to my mind, was "Worker Threads". They provide a .terminate method which does what I need. (But now I have to deal with inter process communication, which is very complex to keep everything synced)
Would be awesome if someone could give me a hint/tip.
Nodejs does not provide any feature to do what you want so you will have to do a bunch of things manually. As you've discovered, deleting the module for the module cache only affects what happens if you try to load the code again, it does not affect the already loaded code at all.
If you're going to keep the plug-ins in the same process, then you can implement a required method in your plug-ins called something like "shutdown" where the plug-in shuts itself down manually (stops timers, unregisters event handlers, etc...). Implemented correctly, this should disconnect it entirely from anything in your nodejs program. If you then delete the module from the require cache, you can then load a new module in its place. The one downside to this is that nodejs does not ever unload the original code - it just stays in memory. If you're not accessing that original module handle, that code never gets used again, but it isn't freed or GCed by nodejs.
A bit more robust system would be to put each plug-in in their own child-process or worker thread and just communicate with them via the built-in interprocess communication between parent and child process which is essentially just messaging. As long as you don't have to send large amounts of data between parent and child/worker or have super high bandwidth data, then the messaging is pretty simple to use and works well.
If using a separate child process, you can then kill the child process at anytime and the OS will reclaim all resources used by the process (not quite so true for a workerThread). This has its own downsides in that it will likely use a lot more memory since a whole new nodejs process or workerThread in nodejs is a much heavier weight thing than just loading a single module into your existing nodejs process.
Running it in a child process has the advantage that your main process is much more protected from errant code in the plug-in (either accidental or malicious) since they are different processes and the plug-in can't directly mess with the parent process. But, don't fool yourself here, unless you run it in a sandboxed VM, the plug-in can still wreak some havoc on the system since it has access to many resources on the system (disk, network, other peripherals, etc...).
I have a routine that crashes linux and force a reboot using a system function.
Now I have the problem that I need to crash linux when a certain process dies. Using a script starting the process and if the script ends restart the server is not appropriate since it takes some ms.
Another idea is spawning the shooting processes alongside and use polling of a counter and if the counter is not incremented reboot the server would be another idea.
This would result in an almost instant reaction.
Now the question is what would be a good timeframe. I have no idea how the scheduler of linux would guarantee a certain update of any such counter and what a good timeout would be.
Also I would like to hear some alternatives to this second process spawning. Is there a possibility to advice linux to run a certain routine in case of a crash of the given process or a listener meachanism for the even of problems with a given process?
The timeout idea is already implemented in the kernel. You can register any application as a software watchdog, but you'll have to lower the default timeout. Have a look at http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog for some ideas. That application can also handle user-defined tests. Realistically unless you're trying to run kernel like linux-rt, having timeouts lower than 100ms can be dangerous on a system with heavy load - especially if the check needs to poll another application.
In cases of application crashes, you can handle them if your init supports notifications. For example both upstart and systemd can do that by monitoring files (make sure coredumps are created in the right place).
But in any case, I'd suggest rethinking the idea of millisecond-resolution restarts. Do you really need to kill the system in that time, or do you just need to isolate it? Just syncing the disks will take a few extra milliseconds and you probably don't want to miss that step. Instead of just killing the host, you could make sure the affected app isn't working (SIGABRT?) and kill all networking (flush iptables, change default to DROP).
I know that node is a single threaded system and I was wondering if a child process uses its own thread or its parents. say for example I have an amd E-350 cpu with two threads. if I ran a node server that spawned ten child instances which all work continuously. would it allow it or would it fail as the hardware itself is not sufficient enough?
I can say from own experience that I successfully spawned 150 child processes inside an Amazon t2.micro with just one core.
The reason? I was DoS-ing myself for testing my core server's limits.
The attack stayed alive for 8 hours, until I gave up, but it could've been working for much longer.
My code was simply running an HTTP client pool and as soon as one request was done, another one spawned. This doesn't need a lot of CPU. It needs lots of network, though.
Most of the time, the processes were just waiting for requests to finish.
However, in a high-concurrency application, the performance will be awful if you share memory between so many processes.
I have some serious bunch of asynchronous operations running, but NodeJS process is just not exiting when supposedly all have been done. Can I somehow find out what keeps it running? Can I see heap stack of running process somehow? Or can you give me tips what are the most usual causes of such idlings?
I don't have any kind of server running there, but I am using async.nextTick quite extensively which basically uses setImmediate. I am not sure if this can somehow get stuck. Also there are no connections to any kind of database or remote server. It's just process that does some work on file system.
Maybe there is some recursive loop, but I have tried using node-inspector and paused execution after it was stuck and it didn't showed me any point in code where it would hanging.
Take a look at process._getActiveHandles() and process._getActiveRequests()
How can you detect if your MFC application is not responding?
Either the same application can start a separate thread, or some other application can run its own thread and periodically call SendMessageTimeout() to send the WM_NULL message to the application in question. If it times out it means that the application is irresponsive.
If you're asking how to do it from within the process itself, you can't, it's a paradox. A blocked process can't detect if it is not responding. It'd be like someone waking himself up to ask himself if he's sleeping.
Based on this and your other question, I'd guess you have a long-running operation and you want the user to wait until it's finished. If they click your window before it's done they get "not responding" and may terminate the application too early.
You need to perform the long-running operation on a separate thread. Here's a great starting point: CodeProject article