[Jack-Devel] Jack: "Too many servers already active"

[Malik Costet]

On 2017-08-23 03:54, Yuri wrote:
> On 08/22/17 18:39, Yuri wrote:
>>
>> This patch should help: https://github.com/jackaudio/jack1/pull/74
> 
> 
> I take it back.
> 
> 
> Jack has 8 slots for servers in the shared memory segment. On one hand,
> you are saying that no jackd is running when the problem occurs. On the
> other hand, jack already checks for dead pids and discards them. But, in
> the end, it fails to find even one available entry in this 8-element
> table. Something funny is going on. You need to print what pids are in
> this table when it fails. Need step-by-step log in jack_register_server .
> 
> You are using Pi? Maybe nobody ever ran jack on Pi?

Yuri, this is highly interesting.

I can think of something that happened during testing which might
correspond to what you found, although it still leaves some questions open.

First a quick overview of my setup. My main process is a Java
application. That application creates jackd instances via a fork (i.e.,
spawns a new process). It also creates jack_clients via native calls
(using Neil C. Smith's jna-jack lib [1]) to connect to those newly
created servers.

Now, one of the problems I encountered today was that something went
south when I tried to deactivate() those clients. Namely that I got a
message on stderr that the JVM couldn't detach the native thread, upon
which the entire JVM froze on me, with me having to SIGKILL it to get
rid of it. Note that I also had manually to kill the jackd process, but
that was achieved with a simple SIGTERM.

This did indeed happened about 8 times (I have since circumvented the
problem by calling close() instead of deactivate() on the client; not
happy because I don't understand what the problem was, but at least it
doesn't happen any more).

There's still two problems however:
 - I can guarantee that none of my Java process nor any jackd instances
were running what the problem happened -- or least none that showed up
in ps.
 - I /think/ that I started the server successfully, after having had
those had freezes, but before I had the "Too many servers active" error.

Discarding the second problem for the time being, as I am not sure of
it, the first one still remains. If, as you say, jack checks for dead
PIDs, how can it not find free slots if no processes are running? Or
does it perhaps not check the OS, but some internal register? In which
case the freeze and kill would prevent that register from being cleared?
This still doesn't make perfect sense, however, since, as mentioned
above, I SIGTERM'd jackd, which can hardly count as a hard exit.
The one thing that was broken was the jack_client in my JVM. So could
that be it? Could it be that because of its freeze, even after having
been killed, the JVM somehow retained resources associated with the
client, and that *that* prevented jack from cleaning up its dead instances?

Questions, questions.

In case I get that issue again, would you mind telling in more detail
what I need to do to get the information you mentioned, or really any
pertinent information?

Oh, and lastly and for reference, I'm running Jack 1.9.10.

Regards,
 M.

[1] <https://github.com/jaudiolibs/jnajack>