Efficient cross-process locking in Ruby

Baking in thread-safety and concurrency support in software is both interesting and a challenging.

Fundamental problems include handling shared states and race conditions. The former is about maintaining the consistency of some shared state in the face of multiple concurrent threads. The latter is usually a consequence of first one and occurs when two or more threads can access shared data trying to change it at the same time.

However sometimes handling shared state is inevitable and in this post we will cover one of the problems we had at HouseTrip and how we solved it.

The problem

When a host sets up his availability, either by making a property available or unavailable and someone is trying at the same time book that property for those dates, we want to make sure these two events can not happen at the same time. Since we are in an environment where you have multiple machines each one with multiple workers that are single processes, it’s not very trivial or assuring that a database lock can handle this use-case. Especially when:

  • You have master+replica DB setup and queued jobs reading data from a replica
  • Multiple processes using different DB connections, putting the DB under stress with locks
  • You need to lock more than 1 entity at same time
  • You need to do run other ruby code that doesn’t necessarily need to interact with the DB. (Writing to mongo or redis for example)

The solution

The most gracefully way to handle this is by using a remote lock that can be easily accessed (read + write) by all the processes on your application. Whenever the process obtains the lock for a specific key, it guarantees you have exclusive access on that code. Translated to concurrency language, we are talking about a mutex. Only one entity can run inside the exclusive code scope where others will queue on a FIFO fashion.

So now, even if our code to book or affect an availability takes a bit longer to do (because we are synchronizing processes) we can safely assume certain operations are definitely atomic!

We built a gem that transparently provides this feature which stores the lock on either a redis or memcache backend. Also it provides features like:

  • Expiration of keys
  • Number of retries to get the lock
  • Time interval between retries

A code example that initializes the lock as a global variable:

# redis = Redis.new
# Or whatever way you have your redis connection
$lock = RemoteLock.new(RemoteLock::Adapters::Redis.new(redis))

def my_method
  $lock.synchronize("some-key") do
    # stuff that needs synchronization in here
  end
end

In our codebase we go a step further and encapsulate this on a lock class which allows us to run our lock block code within an ActiveRecord transaction

require 'remote_lock'

class Lock
  module ClassMethods
    def acquire(name, wrap_in_transaction = true)
      mutex.synchronize(fixed_name(name)) do
        if wrap_in_transaction
          ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
            yield if block_given?
          end
        else
          yield if block_given?
        end
      end
    end

    def acquired?(name)
      mutex.acquired?(fixed_name(name))
    end

    private

    def fixed_name(name)
      name.gsub(/\s+/, '-')
    end

    def mutex
      @mutex ||= begin
        redis_adapter =
          RemoteLock::Adapters::Redis.new(RedisConnection)
        RemoteLock.new(redis_adapter, REDIS_LOCK_PREFIX)
      end
    end

  end
  extend ClassMethods
end

Conclusions

Thread-safety and concurrency are complex subjects. You should avoid dependencies and shared state as much as you can. However, sometimes that’s not possible but there are a few solutions that can be applied to prevent race conditions. In this post we presented a way to achieve a mutex that can be shared across processes and can guarantee that a certain block of code can run exclusively.

Also another side effect of staying away from database locks is you can considerably minimize database contention especially if it’s being hammered by writes and reads every second.

You can get our gem through rubygems by putting the following on your Gemfile:

gem 'remote_lock'

You can also check its source code on github

photo of Pedro Cunha

Developer
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