Brad Fitzpatrick (brad) wrote,
Brad Fitzpatrick
brad

today's rage #1: portable advisory file locking

So at work we made this little network lock daemon, and client that's capable of using them all (or all that are alive) to take out locks. Tiny, tiny, works great.

So then we're like, "Oh, we need a dumb fallback method for people on single hosts. Let's just do flock or fnctl or lockf or something.... that'll be easy...."

Yeah, right.

Either we're all crazy, or flock/fnctl/lockf are a total pain in the ass. Our lock stress tester (10 forked children fighting for a few seconds over a small number of locks) works perfectly with our network lock client/daemon..... the synchronized code (an O_CREAT|O_EXCL open + unlink) never fails.

But once we switch to using local-machine locking, reliability goes to hell.

What's wrong here?
http://www.danga.com/temp/flock-test.c

It seems both fcntl and flock locks are released at different times, but I can't get it right. It only works if I comment out the line after BIZARRE in the source above. (never unlinking the file I flock)

Where's the race?
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  • Ukraine

    Nobody reads my LiveJournal anymore, but thank you to everybody in Russia protesting Putin's insane war against Ukraine. (I know it's risky…

  • Happy Birthday!

    Happy 20th Birthday, LiveJournal! 🐐🎂🎉

  • hi

    Posting from the iPhone app. Maybe I'm unblocked now.