SIGPIPE and multithreading

While working on my socket utilities I ran into a problem: "Thread 1: SIGPIPE"

Hmm.

Wel, lets see what Thread 1 is up to. Turns out it is stopped at a 'select' socket call. But 'select' cannot raise a SIGPIPE can it? No amount of googling did help. SIGPIPE can only occur on 'recv' and 'send'.

So what is going on?

After I added some debug prints I finally found the culprit: It was in thread 4 and it was a call to 'recv'.

So why would Xcode give the message for Thread 1?

This is what I think: the SIGPIPE error -when not handled- leads to termination of the program. This is quite likely a highest level event en thus occurs on the first thread. Hence Thread 1. Thread 1 was not the cause of the problem, but it was the one that is handling the problem.

A bit confusing, and it did cost me a few hours. But that's software development...

Oh, btw, how to get rid of this?

The error is a signal that "the other end" of a connection has closed its side. When a 'recv' or 'send' is called on a socket of which the other side is closed will raise the GIGPIPE exception, which will terminate the application. This can be good if the app is used as part of a series of 'piped' apps. Like most Unix utilities.

However if the app is a server, you want to app to continue working after a SIGPIPE. This can be achieved by setting the socket option SO_NOSIGPIPE to active (1).

A little code segment showing this:

   let receiveSocket = accept(serverSocket, &connectedAddrInfo, &connectedAddrInfoLength)

            

   // Evalute the result of the accept call

            

   if receiveSocket == -1 { // Error

                

      let strerr = String(UTF8String: strerror(errno)) ?? "Unknown error code"

      telemetry?.endTime = NSDate()

      telemetry?.result = .ERROR(message: strerr)

      return .ERROR(message: strerr)

                

   } else {  // Success, return the accepted socket

                

                

      // ================================================

      // Set the socket option: prevent SIGPIPE exception

      // ================================================

                

      var optval = 1;

                

      let status = setsockopt(

         receiveSocket,

         SOL_SOCKET,

         SO_NOSIGPIPE,

         &optval,

         socklen_t(sizeof(Int)))

                

      if status == -1 {

         let strError = String(UTF8String: strerror(errno)) ?? "Unknown error code"

         close(receiveSocket)

         return .ERROR(message: strError)

      }

To be fair: I am not sure if the 'accept' call will copy the SO_NOSIGPIPE to the newly created receive socket. If it does do that, then setting this option for the server socket would be enough.

Happy coding...

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