From: Luke Kanies <luke@...>
Date: 2005-08-16T01:26:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Unit testing servers

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Adam Keys wrote:

> I'm doing something pretty similar to this.  I've got a class that
> knows how to start and stop Web Services servers (XMLRPC, SOAP,
> etc.)  in their own thread.  I start a fresh server in TestCase#setup
> and kill it in TestCase#teardown.  I riffed off the soap4r test cases
> [1].  I'd be happy to go into more detail if you'd like.

You know, I had a test that looked a lot like that and worked for small
transfers but failed for transfers above about 20k, but now it doesn't
even work for small transfers (even as small as one byte).  I had the
server in a separate thread and the client in the main process, and it
worked.  When I tried using the same process for passing large files
around, though, I got a deadlock every time.

I really am assuming that I'm just retarded and there's something weird
going on with my code, but if everything works fine in a separate
process (which it does) then it's not worth spending days figuring out
how to use threads purely for testing.

I did finally get a forked process to work for testing, as long as I use
the fork with a block, rather than a pure fork, and I'll stick with that
unless I can find some clear failure in my threading code.

Incidentally, here's my current thread test code:

http://reductivelabs.com/cgi-bin/puppet.cgi/file/language/trunk/test/server/tc_server.rb

The threading test is disabled, because, well, it deadlocks (and the
timeouts don't seem to work with deadlocks, which I suppose makes
sense).

I've also tried it with the client in the main thread, not in a separate
thread, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

-- 
Zeilinger's Fundamental Law:
    There is no Fundamental Law.
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config.sage.org