[vbox-dev] Web server and virtualbox api

[Klaus Espenlaub]

On 20.07.2012 02:55, Joao Milasch wrote:
> Hi, I have a simple web server that basically returns a screenshot or a
> particular running vm.
>
> It's an application running on top of Flask, a python MVC framework, and
> on an nginx/uwsgi web server:
[...]

> It works just fine when I run it standalone. The problem I'm having starts when I decide to host this micro-application on an nginx webserver. Again, all works fine until I enable more than one worker to listen to more request at once. Then vbox api starts throwing weird exceptions:
>
> Traceback  (most  recent  call  last):
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1701,  in  __call__
>      return  self.wsgi_app(environ,  start_response)
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1689,  in  wsgi_app
>      response  =  self.make_response(self.handle_exception(e))
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1687,  in  wsgi_app
>      response  =  self.full_dispatch_request()
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1360,  in  full_dispatch_request
>      rv  =  self.handle_user_exception(e)
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1358,  in  full_dispatch_request
>      rv  =  self.dispatch_request()
>    File  "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py",  line  1344,  in  dispatch_request
>      return  self.view_functions[rule.endpoint](**req.view_args)
>    File  "/home/milasch/dev/nginx_test/__init__.py",  line  36,  in  screenshot
>      vm  =  mgr.vbox.findMachine("My VM")
>    File  "<XPCOMObject method'findMachine'>",  line  3,  in  findMachine
> xpcom.Exception:  0x80470007  (Stream  operation  would  block  (NS_BASE_STREAM_WOULD_BLOCK))

You don't say a word how you create a worker. python in general is 
horrible when it comes to threads, and you seem to have found that 
PyXPCOM can't really deal with the situation at all.

The VirtualBox API is definitely usable by extremely multithreaded 
applications, without throwing random exceptions.

> And these are kind of random, but happen 60-70% of the requests.
>
> Would this be a shared lock issue when I'm locking the VM?

Definitely not. It's exploding somewhere in the XPCOM API stubs on the 
python side.

Unless you (or someone else) feels like debugging PyXPCOM and make it 
thread safe, the only hacky workaround which might work is making sure 
that each and every API call (everything which touches XPCOM) is 
protected by a mutex. Personally I simply don't do anything in python 
which relies on threads.

Klaus

>
> Please refer to:http://pastebin.com/fbWXzMMp  for full uwsgi output.
>
> Any advice is appreciated.
>
>
>
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