Rails の自動ロードはスレッドセーフではありません

Rails フレームワークは定数を自動ロードするため、development や test などの環境では、リクエストを処理する前にアプリがすべてをメモリにロードする必要がありません。ただし、自動ロードは Rails ではスレッドセーフではないことが知られています (少なくともバージョン 6 未満の場合)。また、puma や webrick などのスレッド サーバーを使用している場合は、複数のスレッドによって予期しない問題が発生する可能性が非常に高くなります。

Issue

Background: recently after I upgraded our rails API server to ruby 2.6.x series, an autoloading related error has been observed from time to time when some of the pages are accessed in development environment.
The error message patten:
Unable to autoload constant {SOME_CONSTANT}, expected {/path/to/some_constant.rb} to define it

Investigation

Most of the resouces I could get from Google or Stackoverflow seemed to be pointing the root cause in:

  • Typo in file directories or names
  • Nesting namespace not matching the directory structure
  • Messed autoload_paths records in configuration
  • etc.

However, after manually checking each of the constant files reported in the above errors, I could confirm that there was no such problem in our code.

Further analysis about the configuration and the web server we use, a sudden clue came to my mind...threading problem, because:

The configuration is having the following values for:

  • config.cache_classes = false
  • config.eager_load = false
  • config.autoload_paths << ...
    and we are using the default webrick server for development. (By the way, the rails version is 5.0.7.2 for which webrick is multi-threaded, see reference)

If it was threading problem related to autoloading, it must happen to any api endpoint, so I wrote a simple script and to query a simple endpoint and confirmed what I thought:

  • Started app with webrick: issue -> YES
  • Started app with puma: issue -> YES
  • Started app with unicorn: issue -> NO
  • Started app with puma but set RAILS_MAX_THREADS to 1: issue -> NO
require 'net/http'

# Adjust the number when necessary
THREADS_COUNT = 10

# Use the same url endpoint to make sure
# multi-requests are sent to and hit the
# same controller#action, or rather the
# same constant that rails is going to
# autoload -> which is thread unsafe!!!
API_ENDPOINT = 'http://localhost:3000/api/environment'

threads = []

THREADS_COUNT.times do
  threads << Thread.new do
    res = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(API_ENDPOINT))
    puts "thread=#{Thread.current.object_id}: #{res}"
  end
end

threads.each { |t| t.join }

puts 'DONE'

Solution

Switch to unicorn for development environment as well (same as production environment), which was made easy by a gem called unicorn-rails

Summary

  • The error message was a little bit misleading in the first place because it seemed to be a cause of typo or namespace or directory problems, but indeed it was caused due to multiple threads trying to autoload the exact same constant, therefore causing race conditions
  • Starting rails 6, a new loader called Zeitwerk has been introduced, which seemed to have addressed the thread unsafe issue
  • In ruby the Kernel module has an autoload method, which however is discouraged for use due to threading problem
  • In rails configuration and environment, the following items are important and usually tend to be the source of such issues, so you must be careful when tuning the configuration:
    • config.cache_classes
    • config.eager_load
    • config.autoload_paths
    • config.eager_load_paths
  • For troubleshooting the constants missing issues that might really be caused by typo or namespace or directory, you could:
    • Check the ActiveSupport::Dependencies.autoload_paths in rails console
    • Check the ActiveSupport::Dependencies.autoloaded_constants in rails console
  • Read the rails guide section about Autoloading and Reloading Constants again and again

参考文献

rails ruby

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