Re: RFA: NSAutoreleasePool ivar cleanup

[David Ayers]

Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 06:30 +0000 schrieb Richard
Frith-Macdonald: 
> On 24 Mar 2011, at 06:00, David Ayers wrote:
> 
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > I was chasing a sporadic (very seldom) crash which we noticed on
> > production instances.  The version of the libraries we are using is
> > ancient.  But the issue may still exist.
> > 
> > in NSAutoreleasePool -emptyPool there is this comment:
> >      /* If there are NSAutoreleasePool below us in the stack of
> >         NSAutoreleasePools, then deallocate them also.  The (only) way
> > we
> >         could get in this situation (in correctly written programs,
> > that
> >         don't release NSAutoreleasePools in weird ways), is if an
> >         exception threw us up the stack. */
> >      while (_child != nil)
> >        {
> >          [_child dealloc];
> >        }
> > 
> > well... we may have an incorrectly written program here and we may not
> > catch alle exceptions properly but I currently cannot tell for sure.
> > But whether correct or not, I believe the _child ivar should be cleared
> > after the dealloc since release pools get recycled.
> 
> If you look at the implementation of -dealloc, you will see that in it
> the child removes itsself from its parent (by clearing
> parent->_child).
> You can be sure that _child is set to nil ... if it didn't, the while
> loop would never terminate.
> Your patch, setting _child to nil after deallocating it, ought to have
> no effect (other than wasting a tiny amount of cpu time) unless you
> have some problem elsewhere which is corrupting the _child ivar during
> the call to dealloc (after the point where it is set to nil). As far
> as I can see the only thing going on there is pushing the deallocated
> pool to the cache ... perhaps a problem in the cache? More likely I
> would have thought, would be memory corruption caused by another
> thread.

The patch set's the _child ivar of the receiver of emptyPool to nil.
The dealloc implementation set's the _child ivar of the _child to nil.

I think the _child ivar of the receiver of emtpyPool will retain the
reference to the cached but invalidated pool.

Cheers,
David


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