Fixed Updating user conversation counters is deadlock prone.

[Xon]

Every so often, I'm getting exception originating from inside XenForo_Model_Conversation::rebuildUnreadConversationCountForUser().

Looking at the code-flow, it is a design issue where
rebuildUnreadConversationCountForUser() is accessing other user's conversations inside a transaction which is modifying their own conversations.

This leads to a potential interleaving of updates & selects on the same rows which can cause a deadlock.

Moving the rebuildUnreadConversationCountForUser() call into XenForo_DataWriter_ConversationMaster::_postSaveAfterTransaction effectively fixes this, as it break apart interleaving update/select/update statements.

This is a fairly minor thing, but it crops up every so often.

 

[Xon]

Note; XenForo_DataWriter_ConversationMessage also chains to XenForo_DataWriter_ConversationMaster, which can pull the _postSaveAfterTransaction function into a transaction thus defeating trying to move the call to rebuildUnreadConversationCountForUser out of a transaction.

 

[Mike]

I think I may have to flag this for a future version, as the sort of changes needed don't really fit with a minor bug fix release IMO. I could handle deferring the update a bit, though as you've noted, there are still ways to trigger this inside a transaction. We don't have a straightforward framework for handling deferring activities until later in the request (such as on transaction commit or at the end of the request). These actually become rather straightforward if you can actually use closures...

That said, this might actually be moot in XF 2 anyway due to some changed approaches...

 

[Xon]

I thought it was running into some design limits, and didn't look like it could be cleanly fixed.

In that case, I'll leave my workaround in my Conversation Improvements add-on

These actually become rather straightforward if you can actually use closures...

Well XF1.5's minimum supported version is recent enough that php does have closures. But that would also require building a, relatively trivial, framework for it.

That said, this might actually be moot in XF 2 anyway due to some changed approaches...

Coming Real Soon Now (tm)?

 

[Mike]

Well XF1.5's minimum supported version is recent enough that php does have closures.

We still support PHP 5.2. (The comment regarding < 5.4 when upgrading is deprecation, but it still functions on older versions.)

 

[Mike]

As noted, this should generally be resolved in 2.0.