[erlang-patches] Supervisor shutdown reason when reaching max restarts

[Siri Hansen]

Tobias, thanks for a good explanation. I will post this into the ticket and
we'll take it into account when finishing the review.
Thanks again for your contribution!
/siri


2013/8/23 Tobias Schlager <Tobias.Schlager@REDACTED>

>  Hi Siri,
>
> glad to hear from you, I'll try to do my best to explain the use case I
> have in mind.
>
> Consider you have a one_for_one (or simple_one_for_one) supervisor A with
> a worker child B that dynamically adds children to A (using
> supervisor:start_child/2). Now consider these children also are supervisors
> of type C with various statically configured workers. I now would like to
> monitor supervisors of type C from worker B to be able to take some action
> when *something goes wrong* at one of the C supervisors (e.g. C crashed
> because of one of its subworkers). However, I can't differentiate between
> 'something went wrong' or a supervisor C just exited gracefully (e.g. the
> application was stopped) because supervisors only exit with reason normal
> or shutdown. It is arguable whether to use another restart type for C
> supervisors in order to propagate the exit. However, I don't want to crash
> the whole supervision just to be able to tell that something failed to
> restart somewhere down the supervision path.
>
> In general, the new exit reasons are visible to all processes linked with
> supervisors or monitoring them (so parent supervisors as well as the
> application master will see these reasons). This is why I chose the
> '{shutdown, Reason}' format, which must be supported (according to the
> documentation this is considered a normal exit reason). Thus, changing the
> exit reasons will not affect the behaviour of supervision hierarchies
> (verified by the test suite) or the application master (as far as I can
> tell). The backward incompatibilty is located in processes depending on the
> undocumented behaviour of supervisors always exiting with normal or
> shutdown and not with '{shutdown, Reason}'.
>
> I hope, that my explanation makes things a bit clearer (and not worse).
>
> Regards
> Tobias
>
>   ------------------------------
> *Von:* Siri Hansen [erlangsiri@REDACTED]
> *Gesendet:* Freitag, 23. August 2013 09:50
> *An:* Tobias Schlager
> *Cc:* erlang-patches@REDACTED
> *Betreff:* Re: [erlang-patches] Supervisor shutdown reason when reaching
> max restarts
>
>   Hi Tobias!
> Thank you for the patch. We have discussed this on OTP Technical Board,
> and have come to the conclusion that some more investigation is needed of
> the potential backwards incompatibility. I have written a ticket and the
> job will be prioritized into our backlog. Unfortunately we won't make it
> before the next release (R16B02).
>
>  In order to help us a bit on the way, could you please provide some more
> information about your use case? You say that you are monitoring the
> supervisor from another process, do you mean other process than the
> supervisor's supervisor? If so, could you explain this architecture a bit
> more?
>
>  Who else will see this exit reason? - application_master? - the parent
> supervisors? - other?
>
>  Thanks again!
> Regards
> /siri
>
>
>
> 2013/7/4 Tobias Schlager <Tobias.Schlager@REDACTED>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> this patch changes the behaviour of supervisors to exit with a more
>> specific reason when exiting due to a maximum restart limit hit. This is
>> especially useful (or even necessary) to distinguish between normal and
>> erroneous process terminations when monitoring a supervisor from another
>> process.
>>
>> In the above case a supervisor would now exit with {shutdown,
>> {reached_max_restart_intensity, Child}} where Child is whatever is
>> available to describe the child, either a child id or in case of a
>> simple_one_for_one supervisor the offending child's process id. The patch
>> should not affect the OTP restart behaviour (also for cascaded supervisors)
>> since a subclass of 'normal' exit reasons is used.
>>
>> I'm aware that there is some potential backward incompatibility for
>> people that do not expect {shutdown, Reason} when monitoring a supervisor.
>> However, the feature of exiting normally with {shutdown, Reason} has been
>> around for quite a while now and I think this could be a sensible place to
>> use it. Let me know what you think.
>>
>> The patch does include tests and updated documentation.
>>
>>           git fetch https://github.com/schlagert/otp.gitsupervisor_shutdown_reason
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/schlagert/otp/compare/erlang:master...supervisor_shutdown_reason
>>
>> https://github.com/schlagert/otp/compare/erlang:master...supervisor_shutdown_reason.patch
>>
>> Regards
>> Tobias
>> _______________________________________________
>> erlang-patches mailing list
>> erlang-patches@REDACTED
>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-patches
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-patches/attachments/20130823/c514772e/attachment.htm>