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27b Assignment 6 RSS Revisited FAQs

This document contains answers to frequently asked questions about CS107 Assignment 6 on implementing an RSS news search using threads. It addresses questions about thread safety, file descriptor limits, using global variables, gdb errors, and using the Purify memory debugger tool. The key points are that url/urlconnection functions and streamtokenizer are not thread-safe but shouldn't cause issues, all functions in html-utils.h are thread-safe, and vectors/hashsets need semaphores for thread safety. The file limit can be increased and HTTP connections should be limited to 36. Global variables are not needed, and data can be passed via pointers. "fg" may fix gdb suspension, and Purify has bugs but can help debug seg

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42 views2 pages

27b Assignment 6 RSS Revisited FAQs

This document contains answers to frequently asked questions about CS107 Assignment 6 on implementing an RSS news search using threads. It addresses questions about thread safety, file descriptor limits, using global variables, gdb errors, and using the Purify memory debugger tool. The key points are that url/urlconnection functions and streamtokenizer are not thread-safe but shouldn't cause issues, all functions in html-utils.h are thread-safe, and vectors/hashsets need semaphores for thread safety. The file limit can be increased and HTTP connections should be limited to 36. Global variables are not needed, and data can be passed via pointers. "fg" may fix gdb suspension, and Purify has bugs but can help debug seg

Uploaded by

Khatia Ivanova
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CS107 Assignment 6: Frequently Asked Questions

1. Question: You provide us with a lot of code. But what's thread safe and what isn't?

Answer: Excellent question! The url, urlconnection, and streamtokenizer functions aren't thread safe, but this shouldn't be a
problem. The url and urlconnection functions are nothing more than constructors and destructors, and there's no reason for two
threads to be racing to construct and dispose of shared urls and urlconnections. streamtokenizer functions aren't thread-safe, but
you don't need to (and I'm sure you weren't inclined to) share streamtokenizers with multiple threads so that they'd be racing
with competing nextToken calls. All the functions in html-utils.h are thread-safe. The vector and hashset are not thread-safe, and
because all of your threads will be competing to access and update several hashsets and vectors, you need to use Semaphores to
prevent race conditions.

2. Question: How many files are allowed to be open at the same time? Do I need to worry about this? OR I'm getting response
code 0's all the time. What gives?

Answer: By default, each process is limited to 128 open FILE *s. Three of these are used for stdin, stdout, and stderr, so the
most that rss-news-search cane have open at any one time is 125. However, you can bump that limit up to the max by typing

limit descriptors 256

at the command prompt. The data files have been updated so that rss-feeds-tiny.txt is small enough so that a test run won't max
out on the number of open files.

The ultimate solution to this has you implement that portion of the assignment that limits the number of active HTTP connections
to 36. This is a little trickier than you might think, because you have to protect yourself against deadlock if a good number of calls
to ParseArticle call themselves recursively via an HTTP response of 30x. If you get this working, and you get it working well, then
your rss-news-search application is all set to digest even the large rss-feeds.txt file.

3. Question: Are we allowed to use global variables?

There's no compelling reason to use globals in this particular program, so no!

The sequential solution we've provided packages all of the data structures into a single rssDatabase struct, and the address of
that struct is passed down from main, through the XML parser as user data, so that it's available to the callback functions and all
the code called by them. You can add any Semaphores to the rssDatabase structure so they, like the hashsets and vectors
they contain, are available to all threads.

4. Question: Sometimes my gdb just quits and says "suspended (tty input)". How do I fix it?

GDB's got a strange bug. Just type "fg" (foreground) and it should start running again.

5. 5. Question: How can we use purify?

We've created a new Makefile that sort of works with purify. Go to your assignment directory and grab it from the assignment
directory with the command

cp /usr/class/cs107/assignments/assn-6-rss-news-search/Makefile .

Run make pure as usual to compile, and then execute rss-news-search.purify.


There are some bugs and quirks with Purify and threads, so we can't guarantee it will work, but you can give it a try if you're
running into segfaults and other problems. Let us know if you have problems running it and we'll see if we can help out.

In particular, note that purify will report some false positives. You may see things such as

1. IPW (Invalid Pointer Write) in some library function


2. leaked memory in the thread and semaphore packages even though you clean-up all your semaphores
3. array bounds violations in IsWordWellFormed

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