File handle leak when subscribing and unsubscribing to topics

[hakonsteino]

When a node subscribes to a topic, it allocated some file handles. This is to be expected. When those topics are unsubscribed, not all the file handles are released. More specifically, it leaks one eventpoll handle per topic.

This test script illustrates the problem, and the patch below fixes it. This patch has only been tested on a system that uses epoll - and not kqueue, poll or noop, though i don't see why it wouldn't work.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import rospy
import os
import std_msgs.msg

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

# Print the number of file handles we have open
def print_handlecount():
    try:
        out, err = Popen(["lsof", "-p", str(os.getpid())], stdout = PIPE, stderr = PIPE).communicate()
        rospy.loginfo("Open file handles: %d" % out.decode().count('\n'))
    except Exception as e:
        rospy.logerr("Error counting file handles: %s" % str(e))

# Loop 5 times, subscribing to 10 topics, then unsubscribing
if __name__ == "__main__":

    rospy.init_node("TestNode")
    rospy.loginfo("Starting test node")
    print_handlecount()

    num_topics = 10
    for a in range(5):
        subs = [rospy.Subscriber("/test%d" % i, std_msgs.msg.String, lambda x: None) for i in range(num_topics)]
        rospy.loginfo(f"Subscribed to {num_topics} topics")
        print_handlecount()
        for s in subs:
            s.unregister()
        rospy.loginfo(f"Unsubscribed")
        print_handlecount()

Example output from the script above (timestamps etc. omitted):

Starting test node Open file handles: 58 Subscribed to 10 topics Open file handles: 71 Unsubscribed Open file handles: 70 Subscribed to 10 topics Open file handles: 81 Unsubscribed Open file handles: 80 Subscribed to 10 topics Open file handles: 91 Unsubscribed Open file handles: 90 Subscribed to 10 topics Open file handles: 101 Unsubscribed Open file handles: 100 Subscribed to 10 topics Open file handles: 111 Unsubscribed Open file handles: 110

The patch here is for topics.py.

@@ -215,6 +215,9 @@
             self.remove_fd = self.noop
             self.error_iter = self.noop_iter

+    def stop(self):
+        del self.poller
+
     def noop(self, *args):
         pass

@@ -302,6 +305,8 @@

     def __del__(self):
         # very similar to close(), but have to be more careful in a __del__ what we call
+        self.connection_poll.stop()
+        del self.connection_poll
         if self.closed:
             return
         if self.connections is not None:

[hakonsteino]

I should add that this is for ROS Noetic