[Boost-users] [Asio] io_service destructor never completes

Subject: [Boost-users] [Asio] io_service destructor never completes
From: Ragnar Cederlund (ragnar.cederlund_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-02 11:55:55

Hi,

I'm having trouble with the io_service destructor never completing. The
application I am working on uses one worker thread to handle all actual work
to be done including communication on a socket in handler functions posted
to the asio queue and another thread to handle the gui of the application.

At a certain point in time the program decides that it has nothing more to
do and calls the io_service::stop function. Shortly thereafter the thread
returns from its call to the io_service::run function. The next thing that
happens is that the io_service object goes out of scope and thus the
io_service destructor is called. After this the thread signals that it is
finished and the application exits.

The problem I am seeing is that the destructor never finishes. Or actually,
a customer sees this problem, but I have not been able to reproduce this so
all the information I have comes from adding (excessive) logging in the
boost source.

The io_service destructor loops through all services and calls
shutdown_service on each one. The win_iocp_io_service handles this call by
entering a while loop that should complete when the outstanding_work_
variable becomes zero. Inside the loop, there is a call to
GetQueuedCompletionStatus to dequeue a completion packet, which is then
tested to see if it contains a valid operation that is then destroyed and
the outstanding_work_ variable is decremented.

In all the runs I have made, outstanding_work_ is initially 1 when the
shutdown_service function is entered. The first and second calls to
GetQueuedCompletionStatus come back immediately and the second results in
the outstanding_work_ variable being decremented and the loop exits.
Everything is fine.

At the customer location however, the second call times out instead of
completing immediately and it continues to do so for subsequent loop
iterations until the application is forcibly closed. There is only one of
our customers who gets this problem. The customer runs Windows XP SP3, but I
have failed to reproduce this on my own XP test machine.

We have tried both Boost version 1.43 and version 1.40 with the same result.
In both cases, the customer has the problem but I cannot reproduce it. The
asio behavior has changed somewhat between the versions and the description
of the problem above is with version 1.43.

Does anyone have any idea of what may be going on? Any hints or tips are
appreciated! Could we be using asio wrong in some way that could cause this,
but we're just lucky most of the time? The customer may be running in a
virtual machine, could this affect io completion ports in a way that could
be problematic for asio?

Cheers,
Ragnar