Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #29: Approved by til

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
I made the change in a clean install and tested it for concurrency problems and with 5 simultaneous scripts creating new users I was about to create 50k users (100k acs_objects) without any duplicated keys. There were no deadlocks or any appreciable decline in the speed of account creation versus doing just one thread creating accounts (i.e. one was taking ~100ms per acct and 5 were taking ~500ms per account for about the same total accounts/sec being created).

I did find a concurrency problem with the acs_objects_context_id_up_tr trigger (which maintains the acs_object_context_index table), which only manifested itself because of a second bug in the trigger. The plain old bug was simple...it said:

  if new.object_id = old.object_id and
     new.context_id = old.context_id and
     new.security_inherit_p = old.security_inherit_p then
    return new;
  end if;
but if new.context_id and old.context_id were null it would still evaluate the trigger code since new.context_id = old.context_id is false if both are null.

Changing it to this:

 
if new.object_id = old.object_id
     and ((new.context_id = old.context_id)
	  or (new.context_id is null and old.context_id is null))
     and new.security_inherit_p = old.security_inherit_p then
    return new;
end if;
fixes that. Although the concurrency problem still exists, it is far less likely that it would be encountered with this fix applied.
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Posted by Tom Jackson on

Thanks Jeff for doing this. This is one of those non-glamorous jobs that is probably also tedious, but I think it benefits everyone.