Maximum call stack size exceeded

[MSNexploder]

The following code dies using node v0.4.12. I was able to track down the problem within the nowUtil.extend function, which gets recursively for deeply nested objects until stack size exceeds. More precisely it looks like it couldn't handle circular references properly.

But I couldn't come up with a not too hacky solution for this.

var io = require('socket.io');
var now = require('now');
var express = require('express');

var server = express.createServer();
var store = new io.RedisStore();

var everyone = now.initialize(server, {socketio: {store: store}});
// => RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

[ericz]

Indeed the extend function doesn't currently handle circular references correctly causing the error. Not sure if we're going to fix this atm

[steveWang]

Eric -- as a quick fix (and the least hacky method -- decycle / retrocycle is not really a good option), would you consider changing it such that nowjs.initialize modifies the input object, as opposed to the default settings object (how I believe things are currently done)?

I haven't looked at the code in some time, but this might be as simple as reversing the order of the arguments to nowUtil.extend.

edit: it's slightly more complicated. I think the fix would be to change nowUtil.extend(this.options, options); to this.options = nowUtil.extend(options, this.options);.

[ericz]

Yeahhh you want the defaults to be overwritten so it has to extend into this.options or extra memory will be used

[steveWang]

Erm, all right, it's not as simple as this, but the main idea is there. You'd actually want to use a slight variant of extend that only adds fields if they didn't already exist in the target.

I think it might be something like the following:

function recurse(source, dest) {
  for (var i in source) {
    if (source[i] && typeof source[i] === 'object') {
      if (!dest[i] || typeof dest[i] !== 'object') {
        dest[i] = Array.isArray(source[i]) ? [] : {};
      }
      recurse(source[i], dest[i]);
    }
    else if (dest[i] === undefined) {
      dest[i] = source[i];
    }
  }
}

Also, sorry, I don't follow -- does it really use more memory if you extend into the other object, then overwrite this.options?

[ericz]

makes sense. i'll implement that

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Steve Wang < reply@reply.github.com>wrote:

Erm, all right, it's not as simple as this, but the main idea is there. You'd actually want to use a slight variant of extend that only adds fields if they didn't already exist in the target.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/Flotype/now/issues/143#issuecomment-2287717

510-691-3951 EECS Student at UC Berkeley http://ericzhang.com

[ericz]

Fixed