php signals while selecting

Ammon — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:26:38 +0000

So a fairly longstanding gripe of mine has been that PHP fails to execute registered signal handlers when it receives a signal in the middle of a blocking select call. Today, I finally bumped into a situation where I couldn't just change the spec to avoid the situation... and I've finally figured out how to make it work.

The bug has been reported here, where it was ignored for a few months before being shot down and ignored some more as per php dev team regulations.

Sample code given by the reporter of the bug is markedly similar to the situations I've encountered the problem:

pcntl_signal(SIGINT, "sig_handler");
$sock = socket_create_listen($port);
$read_socks = array($sock);
$n = NULL;
$foo = socket_select($read_socks, $n, $n, NULL);

By filling in his blanks, my first test case looks something like this:

function sig_handler($signo) {
echo "received sig #$signo\\\n";
}
pcntl_signal( SIGINT, "sig_handler" );

$socket = socket_create_listen( 1234 );
$r = array( $socket );
$n = NULL;
while( true ) {
$foo = socket_select( $r, $n, $n, NULL );
echo "select returned '$foo'\\\n";
}
?>

When executing the script and pressing ^C (which sends SIGINT), the following occurs:

ammon@morbo:~$ php sigtest.php
PHP Warning: socket_select(): unable to select [4]: Interrupted system call in /home/ammon/sigtest.php on line 13
select returned ''

Ok, so the warning is to be expected, and we can easily squelch that.

The real problem is that the signal handler never runs.

However... for the first time in my life, a response to a php bug report proves enlightening. The dev who answered this ticket provides his sample code and says he can't duplicate the bug. Upon looking at the differences between their code, only one difference stands out:

declare(ticks=1);

The declare(ticks) directive is deprecated as of php 5.3 and will not be with us in php 6.0. Ticks are an unreliable, unpredictable, and generally bad thing in php. I've neither successfully used them nor seen a successful and justified use.

That being said... turning the tick on but not telling it to do anything appears to address the problem of discarded interrupts:

declare(ticks=1);

function sig_handler($signo) {
echo "received sig #$signo\\\n";
}
pcntl_signal( SIGINT, "sig_handler" );

$socket = socket_create_listen( 1234 );
$r = array( $socket );
$n = NULL;
while( true ) {
$foo = @socket_select( $r, $n, $n, NULL );
echo "select returned '$foo'\\\n";
}
?>

And execution:

ammon@morbo:~$ php sigtest.php
received sig #2
select returned ''

Which is precisely the desired behavior.

I don't know what the performance hit for turning ticks on is, I haven't had time to research this. But I can confirm that by declaring ticks globally, it does work in an OO environment as well:

declare(ticks=1);

class signal_tester {
function __construct() {
pcntl_signal( SIGINT, array(&$this,"sig_handler") );
$this->start();
}

function sig_handler($signo) {
echo "received sig #$signo\\\n";
}

function start() {
$socket = socket_create_listen( 1234 );
$r = array( $socket );
$n = NULL;
while( true ) {
$foo = @socket_select( $r, $n, $n, NULL );
echo "select returned '$foo'\\\n";
}
}
}

$test = new signal_tester();
?>

Executing and hitting ^C:

ammon@morbo:~$ php sigtest.php
received sig #2
select returned ''

After a few minutes of largely unscientific testing, it appears that turning ticks on globally costs a whopping 4 bytes of ram and causes the script to occasionally consume more cpu than the top process I used to monitor it. So... at first glance the cost is pretty negligible and all I can say is that if you ever need to handle signals (SIGTERM, SIGHUP, etc...) from within a blocking select call in php, it looks like declare ticks is the only option for now.

I did the initial tests in 5.1.6, but can confirm the same behavior in 5.2.5. I don't know how the behavior is going to be in 5.3, since I don't run alpha releases on my servers but my gut likes to think that it will continue to work the same for now... and will hopefully not break until 6.0 (when everything else will explode for a few years). Shrug.

Untitled » posix signals

php signals while selecting