On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 02:24:01AM +0200, Thorben Thuermer wrote:
> on http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/features.html we find:
> "libcurl is designed and implemented entirely thread safe."
> "libcurl uses certain system calls to obtain information. Some of the most
> crucial ones are the name resoluition calls (the gethostby* family)."
>
> i just debugged a problem in a multithreaded application
> ( https://github.com/volkszaehler/vzlogger , thread in german:
> http://volkszaehler.org/pipermail/volkszaehler-users/2012-October/000619.html )
> that appers to be caused by libcurl's (ab)use of alarm() to timeout
> gethostbyname() not being thread-safe.
> (as described here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=539809 ).
>
> there appears to be a race-condition when two threads run requests
> simultaneously, which reproducibly leads to a crash with
> the logging function being called with an invalid buffer/file,
> without any actual dns-timeout having occured.
> (the application only accesses localhost, which is defined in /etc/hosts,
> curiously the problem persists if a numeric IP is used.)

If the problem exists even with a numeric IP, then it's unlikely to be a
DNS issue since numeric addresses bypass the external resolver. Are you
making SSL connections by chance? There is more you may need to do in that
case; http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-tutorial.html#Multi-threading

> the problem disappeared when i compiled libcurl without HAVE_ALARM.

CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL ought to do the same at run-time, but it's odd that
this occurs with numeric addresses (assuming SSL is not involved).

> i'm not sure if this is a libcurl bug or just a documentation issue,
> but it has cost us some time to track down...

This is from curl_easy_setopt(3)
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html

CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL

    Pass a long. If it is 1, libcurl will not use any functions that install
    signal handlers or any functions that cause signals to be sent to the
    process. This option is mainly here to allow multi-threaded unix
    applications to still set/use all timeout options etc, without risking
    getting signals. (Added in 7.10)

And this is from libcurl-tutorial(3)
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-tutorial.html#Multi-threading

    When using multiple threads you should set the CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL option
    to 1 for all handles.

libcurl now gives a number of choices of DNS resolver back-end at
compile time, some of which are immune to this problem.

>>> Dan
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Received on 2012-10-22