Signal Handling with Ruby 2.0

2013-02-23

A user recently ran Sidekiq with Ruby 2.0 and found that the signal handling did not work well at all. Ctrl-C and other signals resulted in some ominous stack traces.

It turns out that Ruby 2.0 locks down what you can do in a signal handler in order to prevent unsafe or possibly non-deterministic behavior. You can’t take a Mutex within a signal handler anymore as this could result in a thread context switch or even deadlock. In fact you can’t even write to a Logger because it tries to use a Mutex internally.

I rewrote the signal handling to conform with the new restrictions: all handlers now just push the name of the signal onto a global array and the main thread polls once per second for unhandled signals. This isn’t perfect, polling is something to be avoided where possible, but I don’t know of a better solution and it’s a lot better than the previous “fat” handlers that did a lot of work.