[Bug]: ResponderDispatchService.DisposeAsync() can deadlock

[Cyberboss]

Description

The _finalizer Task relies on the _dispatcher Task closing the channel to be able to complete. But it's possible for this to never happen.

The channel completion call relies on several throws possible from the CancellationToken not happening.

• https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Discord/blob/1f248a4b5bcd4c4b19e78329378cd49ce4510464/Backend/Remora.Discord.Gateway/Services/ResponderDispatchService.cs#L143
• https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Discord/blob/1f248a4b5bcd4c4b19e78329378cd49ce4510464/Backend/Remora.Discord.Gateway/Services/ResponderDispatchService.cs#L151
• https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Discord/blob/1f248a4b5bcd4c4b19e78329378cd49ce4510464/Backend/Remora.Discord.Gateway/Services/ResponderDispatchService.cs#L165

The deadlock is usually avoided because the _finalizer Task also usually throws out before it gets to that point

• https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Discord/blob/1f248a4b5bcd4c4b19e78329378cd49ce4510464/Backend/Remora.Discord.Gateway/Services/ResponderDispatchService.cs#L188-L191
• https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Discord/blob/1f248a4b5bcd4c4b19e78329378cd49ce4510464/Backend/Remora.Discord.Gateway/Services/ResponderDispatchService.cs#L202

All the lines listed can throw TaskCanceledExceptions. The deadlock occurs if any of the first group throw and none of the second group throw. At that point, the app will halt forever when it awaits the Reader's completion.

Steps to Reproduce

It's very difficult to reproduce. The only example I have is a dump of https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation-server deadlocked at this point. For security reasons (bot tokens and SQL credentials) I cannot share it publicly.

Expected Behavior

ResponderDispatchService.DisposeAsync() should complete eventually.

Current Behavior

ResponderDispatchService.DisposeAsync() can deadlock waiting for a channel completion event that never comes.

Library / Runtime Information

dotnet: 6.0 Remora.Discord: 2022.48.0 tgstation-server: 5.12.4 OS: Windows Server 2022

[Cyberboss]

Also the .Completion event won't fire if there are items still in the channel https://stackoverflow.com/a/66521303

[VelvetToroyashi]

Quite the peculiar set of issues, that's for sure. I've been hoping to rewrite mass swaths of Remora's codebase^[1][2], so I suppose I'll definitely tack this onto the list; rewriting dispatch would certainly be a worthwhile investment based on my investigations^[3]

¹ #254 ² Remora.Commands PR ³ Discussion in the Discord

[Cyberboss]

This hacky reflection workaround was able to solve our issue: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation-server/pull/1509

[Nihlus]

Interesting - thank you for the in-depth analysis. I've pushed a suggested fix to the deadlock-fix branch, which should alleviate the problem and fix another issue I uncovered. Please take a look when you have time.

[Cyberboss]

I've integrated this in my software and haven't heard the same bug report, so it looks to be working

[Nihlus]

Excellent!