Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] RPC and signals - processing priority

From: Wladimir <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:04:34 +0200

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 10:55 PM, grarpamp <[email-masked]> wrote:

> While happily processing these:
> received block ...
> SetBestChain: new best=...  height=...  work=...
> ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED
>
> bitcoind very often refuses to answer rpc queries such as getinfo/stop,
> or signals such as kill/ctrl-c. It even registers:
>  ThreadRPCServer method=getinfo/stop
> in the debug log. But the action doesn't happen as expected.
>
> Shouldn't it be checking and processing all user interrupts like
> once per block and doing the chain in the background?
>

This has nothing to do with priority and "user interrupts", but with the
locks on the wallet and client. Every RPC command takes both locks, and
releases them only when finished.

Shutting down also requires both locks, so the operations will be
serialized.

This protects the database and critical data structures. Sure, there might
be some cases in which the locks are not necessary, or read/write locks
could be used instead to improve concurrency, but this has to be approached
really carefully.

Wladimir