CODEWITHSUNDEEP
goconcurrencychannel
s_dolan
s_dolan

Reputation: 1276

Why is my Golang Channel Write Blocking Forever?

I've been attempting to take a swing at concurrency in Golang by refactoring one of my command-line utilities over the past few days, but I'm stuck.

Here's the original code (master branch).

Here's the branch with concurrency (x_concurrent branch).

When I execute the concurrent code with go run jira_open_comment_emailer.go, the defer wg.Done() never executes if the JIRA issue is added to the channel here, which causes my wg.Wait() to hang forever.

The idea is that I have a large amount of JIRA issues, and I want to spin off a goroutine for each one to see if it has a comment I need to respond to. If it does, I want to add it to some structure (I chose a channel after some research) that I can read from like a queue later to build up an email reminder.

Here's the relevant section of the code:

// Given an issue, determine if it has an open comment
// Returns true if there is an open comment on the issue, otherwise false
func getAndProcessComments(issue Issue, channel chan<- Issue, wg *sync.WaitGroup) {
    // Decrement the wait counter when the function returns
    defer wg.Done()

    needsReply := false

    // Loop over the comments in the issue
    for _, comment := range issue.Fields.Comment.Comments {
        commentMatched, err := regexp.MatchString("~"+config.JIRAUsername, comment.Body)
        checkError("Failed to regex match against comment body", err)

        if commentMatched {
            needsReply = true
        }

        if comment.Author.Name == config.JIRAUsername {
            needsReply = false
        }
    }

    // Only add the issue to the channel if it needs a reply
    if needsReply == true {
        // This never allows the defered wg.Done() to execute?
        channel <- issue
    }
}

func main() {
    start := time.Now()

    // This retrieves all issues in a search from JIRA
    allIssues := getFullIssueList()

    // Initialize a wait group
    var wg sync.WaitGroup

    // Set the number of waits to the number of issues to process
    wg.Add(len(allIssues))

    // Create a channel to store issues that need a reply
    channel := make(chan Issue)

    for _, issue := range allIssues {
        go getAndProcessComments(issue, channel, &wg)
    }

    // Block until all of my goroutines have processed their issues.
    wg.Wait()

    // Only send an email if the channel has one or more issues
    if len(channel) > 0 {
        sendEmail(channel)
    }

    fmt.Printf("Script ran in %s", time.Since(start))
}

Upvotes: 20

Views: 29021

Answers (2)

Brent Bradburn
Brent Bradburn

Reputation: 54899

It's important to be aware that sending or receiving with an uninitialized (nil) channel will block forever (see Closed channel vs nil channel).

So what may have happened is that you've either failed to initialize the channel or, after initialization, the channel variable has somehow been reset with a nil assignment (likely due to a bug elsewhere in the code).

In summary: Double check that your channel is not nil

log.Printf("About to use channel %v", mychannel)

Upvotes: 0

Thundercat
Thundercat

Reputation: 120969

The goroutines block on sending to the unbuffered channel. A minimal change unblocks the goroutines is to create a buffered channel with capacity for all issues:

channel := make(chan Issue, len(allIssues))

and close the channel after the call to wg.Wait().

Upvotes: 34

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