I'm pretty well convinced now that there's no reason we should be maintaining a weak map from fileno numbers (our pseudo-file descriptors) to ChannelDescriptor objects (or file-descriptor-like wrapper around a NIO Channel). Here's why:
* If you open a file in C and never close it, it will never close until the process terminates. In JRuby, if you sysopen a file and never close it, we explicitly hold a hard reference to the channel to make sure it doesn't get closed, only because normally we put such mappings into a weak map. * If you open a file in Ruby and never close it and never dereference it, it will stay open. JRuby matches this behavior, since we have a hard reference to the channel via the RubyFile object. * If you open a file in Ruby and never close it and dereference it, it will eventually GC and finalize and close. JRuby also matches this behavior, since IO objects have finalization associated with them. * If you reopen a fileno in Ruby with a new IO object, it may or may not be kept open if the original file closes. Ruby has very inexact behavior regarding the lifetime of file descriptors that have been reopened. In JRuby, if you reopen a file descriptor, we increment a reference count. ChannelDescriptor will only close if it finalizes (becomes dereferenced everywhere) or if its reference count falls to zero (all wrapping IO objects have released it or themselves been collected). I have been unable to find any case where we'd hold references longer than necessary if we removed the weak association from fileno to ChannelDescriptor, and the semantics of file descriptors seems to fit this assumption: they stay open unless closed or unless the objects referencing them get GCed. I also suspect this weak map is the source of some of our spurious EBADF errors, for tests that work with fileno values directly. I've attached a patch for this. All tests run successfully with it, though that's not really an indication that it's "good" since the only likely problem we'd see is leaking of ChannelDescriptor/Channel objects. Eliminating the weak map simplifies IO logic and would reduce the number of weak references we have in-flight for IO-heavy applications. What sayeth you all? - Charlie
eliminate_weak_descriptor_map.patch
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