CAF Receiver, shutdown handling to http requests - chromecast

Some background reading at first :) what is shutdown handling
I'm doing a custom receiver with CAF SDK.
With the similar shutdown handling, I try to dispatch some http requests within the callback like:
receiver.addEventListener(
cast.framework.system.EventType.SHUTDOWN,
e => {
// some http requests
HttpHandler.post(url, somePayload);
HttpHandler.post(anotherUrl, someOtherPayload);
....... (more requests to go)
});
However, I can't guarantee those requests are reaching the destination since the receiver application is about to terminate anytime(Likely less than 1 sec).Those requests were also proved not reaching the destination in fact.
As far as I know, there is no way to postpone the shutdown of the receiver application with CAF SDK itself.
Is there a workaround about it? Is there a way we can postpone shutdown with the help of CAF SDK?

I did some more research, and it turns out you can also use
window.addEventListener("beforeunload", e => {
...
});
instead of
receiver.addEventListener(
cast.framework.system.EventType.SHUTDOWN,
e => {
...
});
Alas, this does not help to assure everything in the callback is executed: the beforeunload callback is terminated in the same way as the shutdown handler.

The answer seems quite simple: turn all http requests to synchronous.
Drawbacks are quite obvious as well, synchronous requests will block the thread. When one request is hung in middle of somewhere due to unknown reasons, the script will be blocked forever unless force shutdown.
Still looking for better way to improve it.

Related

XCB event loop not getting any events

I am making an addon in Firefox, so I have a ChromeWorker - which is a privileged WebWorker. This is just a thread other then the mainthread.
In here I have no code but this (modified to make it look like not js-ctypes [which is the language for addons])
On startup I run this code, conn is a global variable:
conn = xcb_connect(null, null);
Then I run this in a 200ms interval:
evt = xcb_poll_for_event(conn);
console.log('evt:', evt);
if (!evt.isNull()) {
console.log('good got an event!!');
ostypes.API('free')(evt);
}
However evt is always null, I am never getting any events. My goal is to get all events on the system.
Anyone know what can cause something so simple to not work?
I have tried
xcb_change_window_attributes (conn, screens.data->root, XCB_CW_EVENT_MASK, values);
But this didn't fix it :(
The only way I can get it to work is by doing xcb_create_window xcb_map_window but then I get ONLY the events that happen in this created window.
You don't just magically get all events by opening a connection. There's only very few messages any client will receive, such as client messages, most others will only be sent to a client if it explicitly registered itself to receive them.
And yes, that means you have to register them on each and every window, which involves both crawling the tree and listening for windows being created, mapped, unmapped and destroyed and registering on them as well.
However, I would reconsider whether
My goal is to get all events on the system.
isn't an A-B problem. Why do you "need" all events? What do you actually want to do?

APNs error handling in ruby

I want to send notifications to apple devices in batches (1.000 device tokens in batch for example). Ant it seems that I can't know for sure that message was delivered to APNs.
Here is the code sample:
ssl_connection(bundle_id) do |ssl, socket|
device_tokens.each do |device_token|
ssl.write(apn_message_for device_token)
# I can check if there is an error response from APNs
response_has_an_error = IO.select([socket],nil,nil,0) != nil
# ...
end
end
The main problem is if network is down after the ssl_connection is established
ssl.write(...)
will never raise an error. Is there any way to ckeck that connection still works?
The second problem is in delay between ssl.write and ready error answer from APNs. I can pass timeout parameter to IO.select after last messege was sent. Maybe It's OK to wait for a few seconds for 1.000 batch, but wat if I have to send 1.000 messages for differend bundle_ids?
At https://zeropush.com, we use a gem named grocer to handle our communication with Apple and we had a similar problem. The solution we found was to use the socket's read_non_block method before each write to check for incoming data on the socket which would indicate an error.
It makes the logic a bit funny because read_non_block throws IO::WaitReadable if there is no data to read. So we call read_non_block and catch IO::WaitReadable before continuing as normal. In our case, catching the exception is the happy case. You may be able to use a similar approach rather than using IO.select(...).
One issue to be aware of is that Apple may not respond immediately and any notifications sent between a failing notification and reading from the socket will be lost.
You can see the code we are using in production at https://github.com/SymmetricInfinity/grocer/blob/master/lib/grocer/connection.rb#L30.

Elegant way to stop socket read operation from outside

I implemented a small client server application in Ruby and I have the following problem: The server starts a new client session in a new thread for each connecting client, but it should be possible to shutdown the server and stop all the client sessions in a 'polite' way from outside without just killing the thread while I don't know which state it is in.
So I decided that the client session object gets a `stop' flag which can be set from outside and is checked before each action. The problem is that it should not wait for the client, if it is just waiting for a request. I have the following temporary solution:
def read_client
loop do
begin
timeout(1) { return #client.gets }
rescue Timeout::Error
if #stop
stop # Notifies the client and closes the connection
return nil
end
end
end
end
But that sucks, looks terrible and intuitively, this should be such a normal thing that there has to be a `normal' solution to it. I don't even know if it is safe or if it could happen that the gets operation reads part of the client request, but not all of it.
Another side question is, if setting/getting a boolean flag is an atomic operation in Ruby (or if I need an additional Mutex for the flag).
Thread-per-client approach is usually a disaster for server design. Also blocking I/O is difficult to interrupt without OS-specific tricks. Check out non-blocking sockets, see for example, answers to this question.

Asynchronous HTTP requests with ruby

I have a rabbitmq queue full of requests and I want to send the requests as an HTTP GET asynchronously, without the need to wait for each request response. now I'm confused of what is better to use, threads or just EM ? The way i'm using it at the moment is something like the following , but it would be great to know if there is any better implementation with better performance here since it is a very crucial part of the program :
AMQP.start(:host => "localhost") do |connection|
queue = MQ.queue("some_queue")
queue.subscribe do |body|
EventMachine::HttpRequest.new('http://localhost:9292/faye').post :body => {:message => body.to_json }
end
end
With the code above, is the system will wait for each request to finish before starting the next one ? and if there any tips here I would highly appreciate it
HTTP is synchronous so you have to wait for the replies. If you want to simulate an async environment that you could have a thread pool and pass each request to a thread which will wait for the reply, then go back in the pool until the next request. You would either send the thread a callback function to use when the reply is finished or you would immediately return a future reply object, which allows you to put off waiting for the reply until you actually need the reply data.
The other way is to have a pool of processes each one of which is processing a request, waiting for the reply, etc.
In both cases, you have to have a pool that is big enough or else you will still end up waiting some of the time.

Block TCP-send till ACK returned

I am programming a client application sending TCP/IP packets to a server. Because of timeout issues I want to start a timer as soon as the ACK-Package is returned (so there can be no timeout while the package has not reached the server). I want to use the winapi.
Setting the Socket to blocking mode doesn't help, because the send command returns as soon as the data is written into the buffer (if I am not mistaken). Is there a way to block send till the ACK was returned, or is there any other way to do this without writing my own TCP-implementation?
Regards
It sounds like you want to do the minimum implementation to achieve your goal. In this case you should set your socket to blocking, and following the send which blocks until all data is sent, you call recv which in turn will block until the ACK packet is received or the server end closes or aborts the connection.
If you wanted to go further with your implementation you'd have to structure your client application in such a way that supports asynchronous communication. There are a few techniques with varying degrees of complexity; polling using select() simple, event model using WSASelectEvent/WSAWaitForMultipleEvents challenging, and the IOCompletionPort model which is very complicated.
peudocode... Will wait until ack is recevied, after which time you can call whatever functionallity you want -i chose some made up function send_data.. which would then send information over the socket after receiving the ack.
data = ''
while True
readable, writable, errors = select([socket])
if socket in readble
data += recv(socket)
if is_ack(data)
timer.start() #not sure why you want this
break
send_data(socket)

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