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This SDK isn't thread-safe (or even multi-process safe) because of OPTIONS cache

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#388 6 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api, backend

Research direction

Start with azure-devops/azure/devops/_file_cache.py and trace how options.json is opened and updated during SDK connections. Reproduce the concurrent access failure if possible, then determine whether the cache can be made safe for threads and processes or bypassed when disabled. Done means concurrent build-agent use no longer produces the reported permission error, with the chosen behavior documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

This SDK is crashing some of my build agents occasionally with this error:
[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Users/USER_NAME/.azure-devops/python-sdk/cache/options.json'

Based on reading the code, it appears to be coming from here:
https://github.com/microsoft/azure-devops-python-api/blob/dev/azure-devops/azure/devops/_file_cache.py

This code doesn't appear to be at all thread, or even process, safe, as it just asserts handles to the file.
If it can't be made thread/process safe, some option to just not use the cache at all, and just fetch it directly when needed for the connection would work. As is now, I've had to implement a machine level mutex and lock all my calls to this API behind it, which is horribly inefficient, but I can't have my builds crashing with random IO errors.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
684
Forks
218
Avg merge
8d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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