php signal not handled right away - php

I have a software written in PHP which can run for a long time, it's lauched via command line (not a web application). I wanted to make sure to call a function when the software exit, including when killed via ctrl+c. When killed by a signal, the shutdown functions (destructors and functions registered via register_shutdown_fucntion() ) are not called.
After some reading, I realized I had to add a handler on every relevant signal just to call "exit;". Doing so solved my problem and works.
My issue is that in some case, the signal is not handled right away. It can take seconds, minutes and in some case, is not handled at all. Just like if the handler code was never reached. I don't really know where to start to debug that. I've tried others signals (sigkill, sighup, etc), same behaviour.
My code is withing these brackets
declare(ticks=1)
{...}
I can't find any correlation between the time it get treated right away and the ones that it doesn't.
Any help would be appreciated.

The signal should be handled this way :
First, you have to make a signal handler like this :
function signalHandler($signo = null) {
$pid = posix_getpid();
switch ($signo) {
//case SIGKILL: // you can't override SIGKILL so it is useless
case SIGTERM:
case SIGINT:
// unexpected shut down
exit(3);
break;
case SIGCHLD:
case SIGHUP:
// just ignore it
break;
case 10:
// user signal 1 received. Process exited normally
exit(0);
break;
case 12:
// user signal 2 received. Precess exited with a catched error
exit(3);
break;
default:
// ignore other signals
}
}
then, in your main process, you have to tell PCNTL you are using this handler :
pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, "signalHandler");
pcntl_signal(SIGINT, "signalHandler");
// pcntl_signal(SIGKILL, "signalHandler"); // you can't override SIGKILL so it is useless
pcntl_signal(SIGCHLD, "signalHandler");
pcntl_signal(SIGHUP, "signalHandler");
pcntl_signal(10, "signalHandler");
pcntl_signal(12, "signalHandler");
I'm using this and seems to work for 200 process, 8 process running at the same time, and 10 sec for each process.
Here, when a process exits, he sends a signal 10 or 12 (for success or error) using posix_kill($pid, 10)

I think the problem here is that maybe you make a call to a function that has loop in it and every iteration of the loop takes a lot of time (for example, fetching data from database). In this case, when your program receives a stop signal, it adds this signal to stack, waits, until data will be fetched from database, and then calls signal handler function.
I'm also looking for a way to immediately call signal handler function. Maybe PHP just doesn't have this option.
UPDATE:
I think I found the solution. Try to pass false as the 3rd argument to function pcntl_signal() like this:
pcntl_signal(SIGINT, function () {
echo 'Do something here.';
}, false);

Related

Commands return exit code 2 while process is terminating [duplicate]

I have one simple program that's using Qt Framework.
It uses QProcess to execute RAR and compress some files. In my program I am catching SIGINT and doing something in my code when it occurs:
signal(SIGINT, &unix_handler);
When SIGINT occurs, I check if RAR process is done, and if it isn't I will wait for it ... The problem is that (I think) RAR process also gets SIGINT that was meant for my program and it quits before it has compressed all files.
Is there a way to run RAR process so that it doesn't receive SIGINT when my program receives it?
Thanks
If you are generating the SIGINT with Ctrl+C on a Unix system, then the signal is being sent to the entire process group.
You need to use setpgid or setsid to put the child process into a different process group so that it will not receive the signals generated by the controlling terminal.
[Edit:]
Be sure to read the RATIONALE section of the setpgid page carefully. It is a little tricky to plug all of the potential race conditions here.
To guarantee 100% that no SIGINT will be delivered to your child process, you need to do something like this:
#define CHECK(x) if(!(x)) { perror(#x " failed"); abort(); /* or whatever */ }
/* Block SIGINT. */
sigset_t mask, omask;
sigemptyset(&mask);
sigaddset(&mask, SIGINT);
CHECK(sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, &mask, &omask) == 0);
/* Spawn child. */
pid_t child_pid = fork();
CHECK(child_pid >= 0);
if (child_pid == 0) {
/* Child */
CHECK(setpgid(0, 0) == 0);
execl(...);
abort();
}
/* Parent */
if (setpgid(child_pid, child_pid) < 0 && errno != EACCES)
abort(); /* or whatever */
/* Unblock SIGINT */
CHECK(sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, &omask, NULL) == 0);
Strictly speaking, every one of these steps is necessary. You have to block the signal in case the user hits Ctrl+C right after the call to fork. You have to call setpgid in the child in case the execl happens before the parent has time to do anything. You have to call setpgid in the parent in case the parent runs and someone hits Ctrl+C before the child has time to do anything.
The sequence above is clumsy, but it does handle 100% of the race conditions.
What are you doing in your handler? There are only certain Qt functions that you can call safely from a unix signal handler. This page in the documentation identifies what ones they are.
The main problem is that the handler will execute outside of the main Qt event thread. That page also proposes a method to deal with this. I prefer getting the handler to "post" a custom event to the application and handle it that way. I posted an answer describing how to implement custom events here.
Just make the subprocess ignore SIGINT:
child_pid = fork();
if (child_pid == 0) {
/* child process */
signal(SIGINT, SIG_IGN);
execl(...);
}
man sigaction:
During an execve(2), the dispositions of handled signals are reset to the default;
the dispositions of ignored signals are left unchanged.

Execute function in php before SIGTERM

I am executing a PHP script through Windows Console. I have some ending functions that write results to a file. Anyway, sometimes I have to interrupt the execution (ctrl + c) and halt the script. I am interested in some way to write the current progress to file between keys stroke and actual sigterm. Is this possible ? I'd really need to be able to resume my script execution from last point the next time I run it. Thank you !
You can register a signal handler for SIGTERM:
function sig_handler($signo)
{
// Do something
}
pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, "sig_handler");
Your handler should then be executed when the signal is received.

pcntl_sigwaitinfo and signal handlers

I'm writing a daemon which periodcally does some work and sleeps some time before repeating it again. But it must still be responsive to outer impacts (i.e. termination request) while asleep.
I managed to implement sleep timeout with ALRM signal and termination with TERM signal (sample):
// ...
declare(ticks = 1);
function do_work()
{
echo "Doing some work.\n";
}
$term = FALSE;
$sighandler = function ($signal) use (&$term)
{
if ($signal === SIGTERM)
{
pcntl_alarm(0);
$term = TRUE;
echo "TERM HANDLER\n";
} else {
echo "ALRM HANDLER\n";
}
};
pcntl_signal(SIGALRM, $sighandler);
pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, $sighandler);
while (!$term)
{
do_work();
// Kick myself after 2 seconds
pcntl_alarm(2);
// Wait for alarm or termination
$signal = pcntl_sigwaitinfo(array(SIGTERM, SIGALRM), $info);
pcntl_signal_dispatch();
switch ($signal)
{
case SIGALRM: echo "ALRM SIGWI\n"; break;
case SIGTERM: echo "TERM SIGWI\n"; $term = TRUE; break;
}
}
// ...
But for Gods sake I can't figure out why the sighandler is never called. I get the following output:
$ php sigsample.php
Doing some work.
ALRM SIGWI
Doing some work.
ALRM SIGWI
Doing some work.
TERM SIGWI
And at the same time if I don't set this handler the script dies because of unhandler signal.
Am I missing somethind? Why is my signal handler function never called? Is it pcntl_sigwaitinfo() interferes?
And are there are any other means to implement timeout and signal handling at the same time?
That's not entirely unexpected.
You've asked for delivery to a signal handler (pcntl_signal(...)), but then also asked to accept the signal without invoking any handlers (pcntl_sigwaitinfo(...)). Your OS gets to decide what happens in this case, and your OS (like mine) chooses to let pcntl_sigwaitinfo() win.
Background
A process can receive ("suffer?") a signal in two different ways:
asynchronous delivery
The signal induces some asynchronous action, typically killing the process or invoking a user-defined handler. pcntl_signal registers just such a handler.
The underlying calls familiar to C programmers are signal and sigaction.
synchronous acceptance
Special system functions note that a signal is pending, and remove it from the pending list, returning information about the signal to the process. pcntl_sigwaitinfo is such a function.
The underlying calls are sigwait, sigwaitinfo and sigtimedwait.
These two ways, delivery and acceptance, are different and are not meant to be used together. AIX, for example, simply forbids "[c]oncurrent use of sigaction and sigwait".
(Related to the above is the concept of the signal mask, which can "block" signals, effectively forcing them to stay pending until accepted or until "unblocked" and delivered.)

Terminating zombie child processes forked from socket server

Disclaimer
I am well aware that PHP might not have been the best choice in this case for a socket server. Please refrain from suggesting
different languages/platforms - believe me - I've heard it from all
directions.
Working in a Unix environment and using PHP 5.2.17, my situation is as follows - I have constructed a socket server in PHP that communicates with flash clients. My first hurtle was that each incoming connection blocked the sequential connections until it had finished being processed. I solved this by utilizing PHP's pcntl_fork(). I was successfully able to spawn numerous child processes (saving their PID in the parent) that took care of broadcasting messages to the other clients and therefore "releasing" the parent process and allowing it to continue to process the next connection[s].
My main issue right now is dealing/handling with the collection of these dead/zombie child processes and terminating them. I have read (over and over) the relevant PHP manual pages for pcntl_fork() and realize that the parent process is in charge of cleaning up its children. The parent process receives a SIGNAL from its child when the child executes an exit(0). I am able to "catch" that signal using the pcntl_signal() function to setup a signal handler.
My signal_handler looks like this :
declare(ticks = 1);
function sig_handler($signo){
global $forks; // this is an array that holds all the child PID's
foreach($forks AS $key=>$childPid){
echo "has my child {$childPid} gone away?".PHP_EOL;
if (posix_kill($childPid, 9)){
echo "Child {$childPid} has tragically died!".PHP_EOL;
unset($forks[$key]);
}
}
}
I am indeed seeing both echo's including the relevant and correct child PID that needs to be removed but it seems that
posix_kill($childPid, 9)
Which I understand to be synonymous with kill -9 $childPid is returning TRUE although it is in fact NOT removing the process...
Taken from the man pages of posix_kill :
Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.
I am monitoring the child processes with the ps command. They appear like this on the system :
web5 5296 5234 0 14:51 ? 00:00:00 [php] <defunct>
web5 5321 5234 0 14:51 ? 00:00:00 [php] <defunct>
web5 5466 5234 0 14:52 ? 00:00:00 [php] <defunct>
As you can see all these processes are child processes of the parent which has the PID of 5234
Am I missing something in my understanding? I seem to have managed to get everything to work (and it does) but I am left with countless zombie processes on the system!
My plans for a zombie apocalypse are rock solid -
but what on earth can I do when even sudo kill -9 does not kill the zombie child processes?
Update 10 Days later
I've answered this question myself after some additional research, if you are still able to stand my ramblings proceed at will.
I promise there is a solution at the end :P
Alright... so here we are, 10 days later and I believe that I have solved this issue. I didn't want to add onto an already longish post so I'll include in this answer some of the things that I tried.
Taking #sym's advice, and reading more into the documentation and the comments on the documentation, the pcntl_waitpid() description states :
If a child as requested by pid has already exited by the time of the call (a so-called
"zombie" process), the function returns immediately. Any system resources used by the child
are freed...
So I setup my pcntl_signal() handler like this -
function sig_handler($signo){
global $childProcesses;
$pid = pcntl_waitpid(-1, $status, WNOHANG);
echo "Sound the alarm! ";
if ($pid != 0){
if (posix_kill($pid, 9)){
echo "Child {$pid} has tragically died!".PHP_EOL;
unset($childProcesses[$pid]);
}
}
}
// These define the signal handling
// pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, "sig_handler");
// pcntl_signal(SIGHUP, "sig_handler");
// pcntl_signal(SIGINT, "sig_handler");
pcntl_signal(SIGCHLD, "sig_handler");
For completion, I'll include the actual code I'm using for forking a child process -
function broadcastData($socketArray, $data){
global $db,$childProcesses;
$pid = pcntl_fork();
if($pid == -1) {
// Something went wrong (handle errors here)
// Log error, email the admin, pull emergency stop, etc...
echo "Could not fork()!!";
} elseif($pid == 0) {
// This part is only executed in the child
foreach($socketArray AS $socket) {
// There's more happening here but the essence is this
socket_write($socket,$msg,strlen($msg));
// TODO : Consider additional forking here for each client.
}
// This is where the signal is fired
exit(0);
}
// If the child process did not exit above, then this code would be
// executed by both parent and child. In my case, the child will
// never reach these commands.
$childProcesses[] = $pid;
// The child process is now occupying the same database
// connection as its parent (in my case mysql). We have to
// reinitialize the parent's DB connection in order to continue using it.
$db = dbEngine::factory(_dbEngine);
}
Yea... That's a ratio of 1:1 comments to code :P
So this was looking great and I saw the echo of :
Sound the alarm! Child 12345 has tragically died!
However when the socket server loop did it's next iteration, the socket_select() function failed throwing this error :
PHP Warning: socket_select(): unable to select [4]: Interrupted system call...
The server would now hang and not respond to any requests other than manual kill commands from a root terminal.
I'm not going to get into why this was happening or what I did after that to debug it... lets just say it was a frustrating week...
much coffee, sore eyes and 10 days later...
Drum roll please
TL&DR - The Solution :
Mentioned here in a comment from 2007 in the php sockets documentation and in this tutorial on stuporglue (search for "good parenting"), one can simply "ignore" signals comming in from the child processes (SIGCHLD) by passing SIG_IGN to the pcntl_signal() function -
pcntl_signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN);
Quoting from that linked blog post :
If we are ignoring SIGCHLD, the child processes will be reaped automatically upon completion.
Believe it or not - I included that pcntl_signal() line, deleted all the other handlers and things dealing with the children and it worked! There were no more <defunct> processes left hanging around!
In my case, it really did not interest me to know exactly when a child process died, or who it was, I wasn't interested in them at all - just that they didn't hang around and crash my entire server :P
Regards your disclaimer - PHP is no better / worse than many other languages for writing a server in. There are some things which are not possible to do (lightweight processes, asynchronuos I/O) but these do not really apply to a forking server. If you're using OO code, then do ensure that you've got the circular reference checking garbage collector enabled.
Once a child process exits, it becomes a zombie until the parent process cleans it up. Your code seems to send a KILL signal to every child on receipt of any signal. It won't clean up the process entries. It will terminate processes which have not called exit. To get the child process reaped correctly you should call waitpid (see also this example on the pcntl_wait manual page).
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/zombies.html
Zombies are dead processes. You cannot kill the dead. All processes
eventually die, and when they do they become zombies. They consume
almost no resources, which is to be expected because they are dead!
The reason for zombies is so the zombie's parent (process) can
retrieve the zombie's exit status and resource usage statistics. The
parent signals the operating system that it no longer needs the zombie
by using one of the wait() system calls.
When a process dies, its child processes all become children of
process number 1, which is the init process. Init is ``always''
waiting for children to die, so that they don't remain as zombies.
If you have zombie processes it means those zombies have not been
waited for by their parent (look at PPID displayed by ps -l). You
have three choices: Fix the parent process (make it wait); kill the
parent; or live with it. Remember that living with it is not so hard
because zombies take up little more than one extra line in the output
of ps.
I know only too well how hard you have to search for a solution to the problem of zombie processes. My concern with potentially having hundreds or thousands of them was (rightly or wrongly as I don't know if this would actualy be a problem) running out of inodes, as all hell can break loose when that happens.
If only the pcntl_fork() manual page linked to posix-setsid() many of us would have discovered the solution was so simple years ago.

When does a PHP <5.3.0 daemon script receive signals?

I've got a PHP script in the works that is a job worker; its main task is to check a database table for new jobs, and if there are any, to act on them. But jobs will be coming in in bursts, with long gaps in between, so I devised a sleep cycle like:
while(true) {
if ($jobs = get_new_jobs()) {
// Act upon the jobs
} else {
// No new jobs now
sleep(30);
}
}
Good, but in some cases that means there might be a 30 second lag before a new job is acted upon. Since this is a daemon script, I figured I'd try the pcntl_signal hook to catch a SIGUSR1 signal to nudge the script to wake up, like:
$_isAwake = true;
function user_sig($signo) {
global $_isAwake;
daemon_log("Caught SIGUSR1");
$_isAwake = true;
}
pcntl_signal(SIGUSR1, 'user_sig');
while(true) {
if ($jobs = get_new_jobs()) {
// Act upon the jobs
} else {
// No new jobs now
daemon_log("No new jobs, sleeping...");
$_isAwake = false;
$ts = time();
while(time() < $ts+30) {
sleep(1);
if ($_isAwake) break; // Did a signal happen while we were sleeping? If so, stop sleeping
}
$_isAwake = true;
}
}
I broke the sleep(30) up into smaller sleep bits, in case a signal doesn't interrupt a sleep() command, thinking that this would cause at most a one-second delay, but in the log file, I'm seeing that the SIGUSR1 isn't being caught until after the full 30 seconds has passed (and maybe the outer while loop resets).
I found the pcntl_signal_dispatch command, but that's only for PHP 5.3 and higher. If I were using that version, I could stick a call to that command before the if ($_isAwake) call, but as it currently stands I'm on 5.2.13.
On what sort of situations is the signals queue interpreted in PHP versions without the means to explicitly call the queue parsing? Could I put in some other useless command in that sleep loop that would trigger a signal queue parse within there?
Fixed my own problem: The answer is the "ticks" declaration. I had, as part of the Daemon process startup done the declare(ticks=1); action, but it wasn't seeming to carry over to the main script (since that was inside a function, in an include file?. Adding a declare(ticks=1) line before the while(true) loop causes signals to come through immediately (i.e. the sleep(1) command causes a tick, so after waking up from sleep, signals are processed).

Categories