Creating promise in one thread and setting it in another - multithreading

Can I have an boost::promise<void> created in a thread and set its value in another different thread through boost::promise<void>::set_value().
I think I am having a crash because of this, probably, so I must guess that no, but I would need confirmation. Thanks in advance.
P.S.: Note that I am using boost implementation.

Yes, you can do that, but you must ensure that the call to set_value() does not conflict with anything in the other thread, such as the completion of the constructor or the start of the destructor.
(According to the C++ standard you cannot even make potentially concurrent calls to set_value() and get_future() but that is a defect and should get fixed.)
To give a more precise answer it would be necessary to see exactly what your code is doing.

Related

node js : there are two setInterval()

I'm Korean. My English skill too low.
In NODE.JS, there are two setInterval().
Of course, nodejs is single thread.
but, I worry about that each setInterval handles same value(or array).
To tell the truth, my circumstance has network and setInterval().
how can I controll the value. Or my worry is nothing?
You want to consider rewording this, I'm having trouble understanding what you are asking (especially in relation to network/threads), but I'm guessing you want to look into what the nodejs event loop is:
http://blog.mixu.net/2011/02/01/understanding-the-node-js-event-loop/
JavaScript runs code in what I like to call turns.
During a turn, the code that is running has full and exclusive access to all variables and the values bound to them. As no other code is or can be running, you don't have to worry about locking.
You can ignore the text below the line.
Note that although this doesn't matter in this case, if you have a process that completes over multiple turns, you should be aware that other code may have taken turns between those turns. Each turn is atomic, and there are ways to make multi-turn processes atomic but they are too complex to explain here.
Note that the concept of a turn comes from the E lang but fits so nicely in JavaScript.
only one thread is allocated to user-level
user level 에서는 오직 1 thread 만 할당 되어있다 .
so, you don't have to worry about thread confliction. or IPC
즉 thread confliction 은 고민할 필요가 없다는 얘기
if your question is not regarding this ,
then you can handle every other case easily by your application-level programming
기타 상황은 응용프로그램 레벨에서 조치 하면 될것 같음.
i'm newbie to here,
so i don't know whether language other than english is permitted or not ....

wxwidgets and threads

In my application I run wglGetCurrentDC() and wglGetCurrentContext() from onThread function
(this function should be called as declared here - EVT_THREAD(wxID_ANY,MyCanvas::onThread))
and I get NULL in both cases. When I run it not from onThread it is ok…
What is work around in order to solve the problem – (I have to run them when getting event from the thread!)
As Alex suggested I changed to wxPostEvent to redirect the event to main thread, which catches the event in its onThread function.In this onThread function I have wglGetCurrentDC() and wglGetCurrentContext() calls ...They still return null.Please explain me what I am doing wrong. And how to solve he problem.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but should you not be using wxGLCanvas and wxGLContext rather than the windows-specific code? At the very least it's probably more compatible with other wxWidget code.
Anyway, from the wglGetCurrentDC documentation, the function returns NULL if a DC for the current window doesn't exist. This suggests that either the context was destroyed somehow or you're not calling it from the window you think you're calling it from (perhaps because of your threading?). I would reiterate what Alex said; don't call UI code from any thread besides the main one.
If you could post some code showing how you're returning from the thread it might help identify the problem. It seems likely that you're doing UI stuff from the thread and just not realizing it. (Hard to tell without seeing any code, though.)
Don't touch any UI-related stuff from a worker thread. This is general requirement for all UI frameworks. Use wxPostEvent to redirect a work to the main application thread.

Can i get the id of the thread which holds a CriticalSection?

I want to write a few asserts around a complicated multithreaded piece of code.
Is there some way to do a
assert(GetCurrentThreadId() == ThreadOfCriticalSection(sec));
If you want to do this properly I think you have use a wrapper object around your critical sections which will track which thread (if any) owns each CS in debug builds.
i.e. Rather than call EnterCriticalSection directly, you'd call a method on your wrapper which did the EnterCriticalSection and then, when it succeeded, stored GetCurrentThreadId in a DWORD which the asserts would check. Another method would zero that thread ID DWORD before calling LeaveCriticalSection.
(In release builds, the wrapper would probably omit the extra stuff and just call Enter/LeaveCriticalSection.)
As Casablanca points out, the owner thread ID is within the current CRITICAL_SECTION structure, so using a wrapper like I suggest would be storing redundant information. But, as Casablanca also points out, the CRITICAL_SECTION structure is not part of any API contract and could change. (In fact, it has changed in past Windows versions.)
Knowing the internal structure is useful for debugging but should not be used in production code.
So which method you use depends on how "proper" you want your solution to be. If you just want some temporary asserts for tracking down problems today, on the current version of Windows, then using the CRITICAL_SECTION fields directly seems reasonable to me. Just don't expect those asserts to be valid forever. If you want something that will last longer, use a wrapper.
(Another advantage of using a wrapper is that you'll get RAII. i.e. The wrapper's constructor and destructor will take care of the InitializeCriticalSection and DeleteCriticalSection calls so you no longer have to worry about them. Speaking of which, I find it extremely useful to have a helper object which enters a CS on construction and then automatically leaves it on destruction. No more critical sections accidentally left locked because a function had an early return hidden in the middle of it...)
As far as I know, there is no documented way to get this information. If you look at the headers, the CRITICAL_SECTION structure contains a thread handle, but I wouldn't rely on such information because internal structures could change without notice. A better way would be to maintain this information yourself whenever a thread enters/exits the critical section.
Your requirement doesn't make sense. If your current thread is not the thread which is in the critical section, then the code within the current thread won't be running, it'll be blocked when trying to lock the critical section.
If your thread is actually inside the critical section, then your assertion will always be true. If it's not, your assertion will always be false!
So what I mean is, assuming you're able to track which thread is in the critical section, if you place your assertion inside the critical section code, it'll always be true. If you place it outside, it'll always be false.

Delphi Win API CreateTimerQueueTimer threads and thread safe FormatDateTime crashes

This is a bit of a long question, but here we go. There is a version of FormatDateTime that is said to be thread safe in that you use
GetLocaleFormatSettings(3081, FormatSettings);
to get a value and then you can use it like so;
FormatDateTime('yyyy', 0, FormatSettings);
Now imagine two timers, one using TTimer (interval say 1000ms) and then another timer created like so (10ms interval);
CreateTimerQueueTimer
(
FQueueTimer,
0,
TimerCallback,
nil,
10,
10,
WT_EXECUTEINTIMERTHREAD
);
Now the narly bit, if in the call back and also the timer event you have the following code;
for i := 1 to 10000 do
begin
FormatDateTime('yyyy', 0, FormatSettings);
end;
Note there is no assignment. This produces access violations almost immediatley, sometimes 20 minutes later, whatever, at random places. Now if you write that code in C++Builder it never crashes. The header conversion we are using is the JEDI JwaXXXX ones. Even if we put locks in the Delphi version around the code, it only delays the inevitable. We've looked at the original C header files and it all looks good, is there some different way that C++ uses the Delphi runtime? The thread safe version of FormatDatTime looks to be re-entrant. Any ideas or thoughts from anyone who may have seen this before.
UPDATE:
To narrow this down a bit, FormatSettings is passed in as a const, so does it matter if they use the same copy (as it turns out passing a local version within the function call yeilds the same problem)? Also the version of FormatDateTime that takes the FormatSettings doesn't call GetThreadLocale, because it already has the Locale information in the FormatSettings structure (I double checked by stepping through the code).
I made mention of no assignment to make it clear that no shared storage is being accessed, so no locking is required.
WT_EXECUTEINTIMERTHREAD is used to simplify the problem. I was under the impression you should only use it for very short tasks because it may mean it'll miss the next interval if it is running something long?
If you use a plain old TThread the problem doesn't occur. What I am getting at here I suppose is that using a TThread or a TTimer works but using a thread created outside the VCL doesn't, that's why I asked if there was a difference in the way C++ Builder uses the VCL/Delphi RTL.
As an aside this code as mentioned before also fails (but takes longer), after a while, CS := TCriticalSection.Create;
CS.Acquire;
for i := 1 to LoopCount do
begin
FormatDateTime('yyyy', 0, FormatSettings);
end;
CS.Release;
And now for the bit I really don't understand, I wrote this as suggested;
function ReturnAString: string;
begin
Result := 'Test';
UniqueString(Result);
end;
and then inside each type of timer the code is;
for i := 1 to 10000 do
begin
ReturnAString;
end;
This causes the same kinds of failiures, as I said before the fault is never in the same place inside the CPU window etc. Sometimes it's an access violation and sometimes it might be an invalid pointer operation. I am using Delphi 2009 btw.
UPDATE 2:
Roddy (below) points out the Ontimer event (and unfortunately also Winsock, i.e. TClientSocket) use the windows message pump (as an aside it would be nice to have some nice Winsock2 components using IOCP and Overlapping IO), hence the push to get away from it. However does anyone know how to see what sort of thread local storage is setup on the CreateQueueTimerQueue?
Thanks for taking the time to think and answer this problem.
I am not sure if it is good form to post an "Answer" to my own question but it seemed logical, let me know if that is uncool.
I think I have found the problem, the thread local storage idea lead me to follow a bunch of leads and I found this magical line;
IsMultiThread := True;
From the help;
"IsMultiThread is set to true to indicate that the memory manager should support multiple threads. IsMultiThread is set to true by BeginThread and class factories."
This of course is not set by using a single Main VCL thread using a TTimer, However it is set for you when you use TThread. If I set it manually the problem goes away.
In C++Builder, I do not use a TThread but it appears by using the following code;
if (IsMultiThread) {
ShowMessage("IsMultiThread is True!");
}
that is it set for you somewhere automatically.
I am really glad for peoples input so that I could find this and I hope vainly it might help someone else.
As DateTimeToString which FormatDateTime calls uses GetThreadLocale, you may wish to try having a local FormatSettings variable for each thread, maybe even setting up FormatSettings in a local variable before the loop.
It may also be the WT_EXECUTEINTIMERTHREAD parameter which causes this. Note that it states it should only be used for very short tasks.
If the problem persists the problem may actually be elsewhere, which was my first hunch when I saw this but I don't have enough information about what the code does to really determine that.
Details about where the access violation occurs may help.
Are you sure this actually has anything to do with FormatDateTime? You made a point of mentioning that there is no assignment statement there; is that an important aspect of your question? What happens if you call some other string-returning function instead? (Make sure it's not a constant string. Write your own function that calls UniqueString(Result) before returning.)
Is the FormatSettings variable thread-specific? That's the point of having the extra parameter for FormatDateTime, so each thread has its own private copy that is guaranteed not to be modified by any other thread while the function is active.
Is the timer queue important to this question? Or do you get the same results when you use a plain old TThread and run your loop in the Execute method?
You did warn that it was a long question, but it seems there are a few things you could do to make it smaller, to narrow down the scope of the issue.
I wonder if the RTL/VCL calls you're making are expecting access to some thread-local storage (TLS) variables that aren't correctly set up whn you invoke your code via the timer queue?
This isn't the answer to your problem, but are you aware that TTimer OnTimer events just run as part of the normal message loop in the main VCL thread?
You found your answer - IsMultiThread. This has to be used anytime to revert to using the API and create threads. From MSDN: CreateTimerQueueTimer is creating a thread pool to handle this functionality so you have an outside thread working with the main VCL thread with no protection. (Note: your CS.acquire/release doesn't do anything at all unless other parts of the code respect this lock.)
Re. your last question about Winsock and overlapping I/O: You should look closely at Indy.
Indy uses blocking I/O, and is a great choice when you want high performance network IO regardless of what the main thread is doing. Now you've cracked the multi-threading issue, you should just create another thread (or more) to use indy to handle your I/O.
The problem with Indy is that if you need many connections it's not effiecient at all. It requires one thread per connection (blocking I/O) which doesn't scale at all, hence the benefit of IOCP and Overlapping IO, it's pretty much the only scalable way on Windows.
For update2 :
There is a free IOCP socket components : http://www.torry.net/authorsmore.php?id=7131 (source code included)
"By Naberegnyh Sergey N.. High
performance socket server based on
Windows Completion Port and with using
Windows Socket Extensions. IPv6
supported. "
i've found it while looking better components/library to rearchitecture my little instant messaging server. I haven't tried it yet but it looks good coded as a first impression.

Pthread mutex assertion error

I'm encountering the following error at unpredictable times in a linux-based (arm) communications application:
pthread_mutex_lock.c:82: __pthread_mutex_lock: Assertion `mutex->__data.__owner == 0' failed.
Google turns up a lot of references to that error, but little information that seems relevant to my situation. I was wondering if anyone can give me some ideas about how to troubleshoot this error. Does anyone know of a common cause for this assertion?
Thanks in advance.
Rock solid for 4 days straight. I'm declaring victory on this one. The answer is "stupid user error" (see comments above). A mutex should only be unlocked by the thread that locked it. Thanks for bearing with me.
TLDR: Make sure you are not locking a mutex that has been destroyed / hasn't been initialized.
Although the OP has his answer, I thought I would share my issue in case anyone else has the same problem I did.
Notice that the assertion is in __pthread_mutex_lock and not in the unlock. This, to me, suggests that most other people having this issue are not unlocking a mutex in a different thread than the one that locked it; they are just locking a mutex that has been destroyed.
For me, I had a class (Let's call it Foo) that registered a static callback function with some other class (Let's call it Bar). The callback was being passed a reference to Foo and would occasionally lock/unlock a mutex that was a member of Foo.
This problem occurred after the Foo instance was destroyed while the Bar instance was still using the callback. The callback was being passed a reference to an object that no longer existed and, therefore, was calling __pthread_mutex_lock on garbage memory.
Note, I was using C++11's std::mutex and std::lock_guard<std::mutex>, but, since I was on Linux, the problem was exactly the same.
I was faced with the same problem and google sent me here. The problem with my program was that in some situations I was not initializing the mutex before locking it.
Although the statement in the accepted answer is legitimate, I think it is not the cause of this failed assertion. Because the error is reported on pthread_mutex_lock (and not unlock).
Also, as always, it is more likely that the error is in the programmers source code rather than the compiler.
The quick bit of Googling I've done often blames this on a compiler mis-optimization. A decent summation is here. It might be worth looking at the assembly output to see if gcc is producing the right code.
Either that or you are managing to stomp on the memory used by the pthread library... those sort of problems are rather tricky to find.
I was having same problem
in my case inside the thread i was connecting vertica db with odbc
adding following setting to /etc/odbcinst.ini solved my problem. dont geting the exception so far.
[ODBC]
Threading = 1
credits to : hynek
I have just fought my way through this one and thought it might help others.
In my case the issue occured in a very simple method that locked the mutex, checked a shared variable and then returned.
The method is an override of the base class which creates a worker thread.
The problem in this instance was that the base class was creating the thread in the constructor. The thread then started executing and the derived classes implementation of the method was called. Unfortunately the derived class had not yet completed constructing and the mutex in the derived class had uninitialised data as the mutex owner. This made it look like it was actually locked when it wasn't.
The solution is really simple. Add a protected method to the base class called StartThread(). This needs to be called in the derived classes constructor, not from the base class.
In case you are using C++ and std::unique_lock, check this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9240466/9057530
adding Threading=0 in /etc/odbcinst.ini file fixed this issue

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