Re: Further information on BUG #17299: Exit code 3 when open connections concurrently (PQisthreadsafe() == 1)

I will try your fix tomorrow. That's a good idea. You asked about debug
information for the libintl stack frame. I wish this were easier, but it
looks like the Enterprise DB folks don't include a PDB file for that DLL,
although they do include them for almost every other module. In addition, I
have no way of knowing what revision or config switches they used to build
it. Any idea how I could contact someone at Enterprise DB that could help
us out here? I would really rather just get the symbols and source revision
from them, as building it myself on Windows is quite a process and may not
contain the same bug.

Thanks for a quick reply, Tom!

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 22:56 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> Liam Bowen <liambowen@gmail.com> writes:
> > I used the EnterpriseDB installer for several versions, and narrowed down
> > the bug as being introduced between 13.5 and 14.1. Then I used git bisect
> > to narrow down which revision actually introduced the bug. Each time, I
> > would build libpq and copy the DLL into the same directory as my
> executable
> > and verify that my build of libpq was being loaded. Eventually my
> bisection
> > pointed to 52a1022.
>
> Hmmm ....
>
> > Here is a debugging session:
> > https://gist.github.com/hut8/3b25e6a581a600589bdc62644734de18.
>
> So as with the original bug #17299 report, this is showing an abort()
> failure inside libintl, although yours is in a slightly different
> place.  It would be interesting to look into the libintl code and
> try to understand what it's seeing as wrong.  Can you get debug
> data out of those stack frames?
>
>
> My gut feeling right now is that the reason 52a1022 tickles this
> is that it causes us to invoke gettext() in the normal, successful
> PQconnect code paths.  I'm too tired to go look, but I suspect that
> before that patch, a non-error connection would never perform any
> message translations (or at least would not do so in the most basic
> cases).  So that would result in us hitting gettext() much more
> heavily than before.
>
> Given that you're only seeing this when performing concurrent
> connections (or at least that's how I understood what you said),
> I'm eyeing libpq_binddomain with a bit of suspicion.  Does it
> help to move down the update of already_bound, like this?
>
>          const char *ldir;
>
> -        already_bound = true;
>          /* No relocatable lookup here because the binary could be
> anywhere */
>          ldir = getenv("PGLOCALEDIR");
>          if (!ldir)
>              ldir = LOCALEDIR;
>          bindtextdomain(PG_TEXTDOMAIN("libpq"), ldir);
> +        already_bound = true;
>  #ifdef WIN32
>          SetLastError(save_errno);
>  #else
>          errno = save_errno;
>  #endif
>
> My thought here is that if two threads went through this code
> at about the same time, it'd be possible for one of them to
> decide that the bindtextdomain call had already happened when
> it had not.  That could lead to that thread calling gettext
> and then the other one calling bindtextdomain later than that;
> and maybe libintl's response to that is as unfriendly as abort().
>
> The above quick-hack change would result in both threads calling
> bindtextdomain, which I'm guessing libintl is prepared to cope
> with (at least, its docs claim bindtextdomain is "MT-Safe").
> If it isn't really, then we might have to additionally add a
> critical section here.
>
>                         regards, tom lane
>