Today I managed to set up my grails environment in such a way that it triggered deadlocks quite easily when stressed with a simple jmeter script. While this was unintentional, it did give me an opportunity to diffuse some ticking time bombs.
A few of the deadlocks were caused by some of the creative ways that my project uses the Groovy on Grails APIs for rendering pages from GSP code stored in a database, and with some tweaks most of those were resolved.
Some other deadlocks, though, seem to be the fault of Groovy itself. A quick google search turned up over 300 hits relating to deadlocks in the Groovy bug tracker:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:jira.codehaus.org+%2Bgroovy+%2Bdeadlock
This is when I had a sad.
I know that as an open source project if a bug really bothers me, I should submit a patch, which I am likely to do, but even if I find fixes for some of the deadlocks I’m facing, I’ll either have to wait for the changes to make it into the Groovy codebase, Groovy to release, grails to pick up the changes, etc. or I’ll have to hack the patch into my application and hope for the best.
Hopefully I’ll find some magic work around that does not tickle these bugs :)
Update: Someone must have seen this blog entry, or maybe they’re just cool. Anyway, they fixed this problem wicked fast: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-6398 Grails continues to rock as a result.
