9 ms·
Node.js setInterval callback function unexpected halt
- congresstart 8y agoIncorrect title, should be 2^31 milliseconds
- mijoharas 8y agoAgreed, I just read the title and thought: Who cares? there is no way this could be a problem yet.
- femto113 8y agoWhich is about 25 days, or roughly a month, either of which would make a better title. I read the article hoping to discover how they ran a test that was 60 years long...
- Arnavion 8y agoWell it would've been the same as what they did for the 25 days case I imagine - using libfaketime.
- stevenwoo 8y agoJust spitballing, could use a tool like the debugger to inject a value into a system library function to set it to 59.99 years or whatever value necessary to do tests.
- johannes1234321 8y ago> I read the article hoping to discover how they ran a test that was 60 years long... If you read the link you could figure that out: ;) "I used libfaketime to speed things up by a factor of 1000 on a linux server "
- rtkwe 8y agoI don't think so, seeing 2^31 (units) immediately tells me what's probably going wrong in a way that 25 days or ~1 month doesn't unless I go and convert that into milliseconds.
- peterkelly 8y agoEven Windows 95 lasted longer than that: https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
- truth_seeker 8y agoIts a feature rather than a bug ;) Can't think why someone would do that. Such a large number of milliseconds just not practical.
- olliej 8y agoLong runtime apps, calendar-esque scheduling, etc al@ seem like things that could reasonably* hit that * specifically they could reasonably end up with time steps >= 2^31ms. Even if the design isn’t ideal it should still work
- avip 8y agoThat does not sound like a sound implementation.
- zamalek 8y agoThe bug occurs if your process reaches ~25 days, period. Regardless of the interval that you set - it could be 1ms and still fail. It has been 'fixed' and is now ~49 days, but setTimeout does not throw and so you have to rely on your process crashing due to some other condition. If you have setTimeout anywhere in your code (including packages), you will need to force it to crash/exit once a month. The implementation of setTimeout in Node is not sound.
- olliej 8y agoIt’s perfectly reasonable: Run task every 4 weeks: Onesecond = 1000; Oneminute = 60 * oneSecond; oneHour = 60 * oneMinute; oneDay = 24 * oneHour; oneWeek = 7 * oneDay; Then from that reasonable set of definitions you make a even fire in 4 * oneWeek. Maybe you aren’t even using setTimeout, but you’re using a timer library that internally is just using aetTineout (what does node have besides setTimeout by the way?). You end up with an accumulation of individually reasonable questions that don’t work, for no obvious reason. That said someone else is saying this actually is a “timers stop working in general after X days”, rather than just long lifetime timers, which makes this even more obtuse.
- 8y ago
- thecatspaw 8y ago> Note that what I meant by that isn't that your services aren't expected to be up for a month. It's that redundancy is expected (2+ instances behind a load balancer) so servers are resilient to failure. I guess thats why he mentioned gameservers specifically, as those often depend on being a single node
- int0x80 8y agoEven if not a gameserver, virtually anything should not be buggy after one month of uptime. That is just ridiculous. Redundancy is completely orthogonal to this issue.
- baybal2 8y agoI hate and like people behind JS development as a language at the same time. Node.js devs more than anybody else realize what's wrong with the general direction of mainstream webdev languages, while at the same time cultivating that culture around themselves like that. A good decision they made was not using high level IO abstractions that both eats performance, and obscures synchronicity implications. And the bad one is their general chabuduo attitude. While nobody in a sane mind will use node.js for an airplane autopilot,or a space mission software, there is no reason for them not to strive for improving node.js reliability to the extend demanded in the "serious software" industry
- mintplant 8y ago> While nobody in a sane mind will use node.js for an airplane autopilot,or a space mission software, The Nightscout artificial pancreas system runs Node.js. https://github.com/nightscout/share2nightscout-bridge/blob/master/index.js#L353 https://github.com/nightscout/share2nightscout-bridge/blob/m... With this bug, glucose monitor readings would stop being delivered after 25 days.
- sp332 8y agoAnd if you boot all your redundant servers at the same time, they're all going to go down pretty close to the same time as well.
- pkulak 8y agoOuch, not a good look when someone keeps mentioning that you should never expect a month of uptime.
- gnulinux 8y ago2^31 seconds is a little more than 68 years. But the thread discusses 2^31 milliseconds, which is a little less than a month.
- manigandham 8y agoIt's milliseconds, the title is incorrect as stated in the comments here and the linked issue thread.
- gnulinux 8y agoYes I fixed my comment.
- ddtaylor 8y agoI am impressed the reporter of the bug kept his cool and did all the debugging work for them using libfaketime while they blobiated about code not supposed to be running for 25 days and being unable to reproduce anything.
- jessaustin 8y agoEh, I've seen worse. Overall it seems everyone was pretty cooperative. We're just lucky this wasn't an npm bug...
- samspenc 8y agoTL;DR from the GitHub discussion: had to do with an integer overflow related to oxffffff hex string lengths and unsigned ints, introduced in one of the Node 10.x versions. This is the pull request that fixes it: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/22214 https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/22214
- kryptiskt 8y agoHere is the commit that fixes it: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/22214 https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/22214
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmitrygr 8y agoWindows 95 had a similar bug https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justicezyx 8y agoSo this is like a reminder to anyone who always reminder others that you do not need to solve problems like Google has.
- baybal2 8y agoWell, so does the settimeout. A lot of underlying code is limited to signed 32 bit integers as per prehistoric convention. JS committee should consider turning timer values into js native signed double
- tomxor 8y ago> cumulative running time is not needed to calculate when next to call the interval I don't see how that solves anything, you are just defining a new limit to be broken, which would occur when the timer resolution is next increased if not in practice. It makes sense that either the actual interval or timeout periods are limited by the underlying types used to store them... but I see no intrinsic reason why cumulative time that setInterval runs need be limited by any underlying type (cumulative running time is not needed to calculate when next to call the interval).
- baybal2 8y ago>I don't see how that solves anything, you are just defining a new limit to be broken, which would occur when the timer resolution is next increased if not in practice. I think that having some uniformity in a zoo of rolloverable values will make life easier to people who don't read the language spec meticulously to the letter. And yes, by any extend of human imagination, no programming language can justify implemention of a plain periodic timer through (oldTime - nowTime) % interval. A timer should be a timer, and modern opetating sysyems provide developers with a whole arsenal of high level timer abstractions just for those people to not to write their own hacks.
- snacktaster 8y agonodejs ecosystem is a dumpster full of just bad code edit: lots and lots of garbage in there
- sctb 8y agoI get that you're expressing a personal opinion, but in this form it's just vacuous snark and doesn't belong on this site. Maybe you could rephrase so that we might stand to learn something? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- trias 8y agodoesn't this fix mean it crashes after 2^32 milliseconds now?
- moefh 8y agoNo, it only uses an int if the value is less than 0xffffffff, otherwise it uses a double. That means it's ok up to 2^53 milliseconds, at which point it starts losing precision (you can't represent every integer above 2^53 as a double, it gets rounded). It doesn't really matter because no computer that exists today will still be running in 2^53 milliseconds.
- chatmasta 8y agoIt’s amusing to see the bottom of issue threads like this grow with messages “issue was referenced from another project.” It would be cool to generate a graph of which projects have issues linking to each other. I suppose it would be sort of like a dependency graph, but one that only includes the most fragile dependencies. :)
- _pmf_ 8y agoSeems similar to this beauty: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12115 https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12115
- canhascodez 8y agoYou seem to be making some sort of negative judgment about that particular issue. Perhaps you'd care to give us the benefit of your reasoning.
- _pmf_ 8y ago> You seem to be making some sort of negative judgment about that particular issue. Perhaps you'd care to give us the benefit of your reasoning. A freshman learns not to store data in floating point data types if the significant digits of the data's domain exceeds the floating points guaranteed 1:1 domain. Some maintainers of node.js's file system module did not (or did not care about it)[]. Given that JS developers are hailed as the pinnacle of software engineering, this strikes me as odd. [] "But JS does not have a proper 64 bit datatype / BigInts" ... that's not an argument
- jschulenklopper 8y agoWould someone seriously encounter a defect like that? Who would set a function to run after ~25 days (2^31 milliseconds) and expect that that process still runs after all those days? You're not safeguarding yourself against the very likely situation that processes could stop over such a long period. Also, considering the length of that period, it's most likely that the delay for the function-to-be-called is from a business (and not some technical) requirement. So, a more fitting design would be to set up a delayed job for asynchronously executing long-running or later tasks in the background by a scheduler.
- jschulenklopper 8y agoSo, kudos to the maintainer to solve the issue, as it is a valid bug to be fixed... but it's not likely (or a case of suboptimal design) that such a defect would ever be encountered for real.
- Vendan 8y agoI quite often write stuff with a function that gets called every few minutes or seconds... which is what the bug was actually discovered on. That's not suboptimal design.
- jschulenklopper 8y agoAgreed. A scheduling process that stops (does not call functions anymore) after 25 days is a strange phenomenon. I misread the post title.
- tedunangst 8y agoWhat? The scheduled delay isn't 25 days.
- jschulenklopper 8y agoNo, I realized later. But also that case wouldn't have worked :-)
- foreigner 8y agoAFAICT hasn't the fix just kicked the can down the road to 2^64 milliseconds? Future NodeJS coders 585 million years from now are going to be cursing at us...
- pvtmert 8y agoexactly same thing i thought when i see some timer bug (not recurring events) i actually came to this bug couple times (nw.js user here) i re-initialize timers once in a week. :/