NAME

       XPARace - Race Conditions

SYNOPSIS

       Potential XPA race conditions and how to avoid them.

DESCRIPTION

       Currently, there is only one known circumstance in which XPA can get (temporarily)
       deadlocked in a race condition: if two or more XPA servers send messages to one another
       using an XPA client routine such as XPASet(), they can deadlock while each waits for the
       other server to respond.  (This can happen if the servers call XPAPoll() with a time
       limit, and send messages in between the polling call.)  The reason this happens is that
       both client routines send a string to the other server to establish the handshake and then
       wait for the server response. Since each client is waiting for a response, neither is able
       to enter its event-handling loop and respond to the other's request. This deadlock will
       continue until one of the timeout periods expire, at which point an error condition will
       be triggered and the timed-out server will return to its event loop.

       Starting with version 2.1.6, this rare race condition can be avoided by setting the
       XPA_IOCALLSXPA environment variable for servers that will make client calls. Setting this
       variable causes all XPA socket IO calls to process outstanding XPA requests whenever the
       primary socket is not ready for IO. This means that a server making a client call will
       (recursively) process incoming server requests while waiting for client completion. It
       also means that a server callback routine can handle incoming XPA messages if it makes its
       own XPA call.  The semi-public routine oldvalue=XPAIOCallsXPA(newvalue) can be used to
       turn this behavior off and on temporarily. Passing a 0 will turn off IO processing, 1 will
       turn it back on. The old value is returned by the call.

       By default, the XPA_IOCALLSXPA option is turned off, because we judge that the added code
       complication and overhead involved will not be justified by the amount of its use.
       Moreover, processing XPA requests within socket IO can lead to non-intuitive results,
       since incoming server requests will not necessarily be processed to completion in the
       order in which they are received.

       Aside from setting XPA_IOCALLSXPA, the simplest way to avoid this race condition is to
       multi-process: when you want to send a client message, simply start a separate process to
       call the client routine, so that the server is not stopped. It probably is fastest and
       easiest to use fork() and then have the child call the client routine and exit. But you
       also can use either the system() or popen() routine to start one of the command line
       programs and do the same thing. Alternatively, you can use XPA's internal launch() routine
       instead of system(). Based on fork() and exec(), this routine is more secure than system()
       because it does not call /bin/sh.

       Starting with version 2.1.5, you also can send an XPAInfo() message with the mode string
       "ack=false". This will cause the client to send a message to the server and then exit
       without waiting for any return message from the server. This UDP-like behavior will avoid
       the server deadlock when sending short XPAInfo messages.

SEE ALSO

       See xpa(7) for a list of XPA help pages