RFR: 8006534 CLONE - TestLibrary.getUnusedRandomPort() fails intermittently-doesn't retry enough times

[Darryl Mocek]

Hi Jim,

    I think this change looks fine.  I think it works for our purposes 
for now and is a quick and painless change.

    The problem as I understand it is that when getUnusedRandomPort is 
called and the port returned is FIXED_PORT_MIN (which is rejected), then 
the code tries again and returns FIXED_PORT_MIN + 1, then +2, etc.  
Since FIXED_PORT_MAX - FIXED_PORT_MIN >= numTries, it fails.  The fix 
increases the number of tries.  This means when FIXED_PORT_MAX - 
FIXED_PORT_MIN increases above the current numTries, then we'll need to 
increase the number of tries again. This probably won't happen for a 
while as we're trying to decrease the use of fixed ports, not increase 
them.  However, there are a bunch of tests which currently use fixed 
ports which aren't using TestLibrary, but should be because we can 
probably convert most or all of them to use a random port.  Those we 
cannot convert should have their fixed ports reserved in TestLibrary.

   After some thought, I think we can improve "getting an unused random 
port by providing a custom SocketImplFactory which will not use 
ServerSocket (as we open the ServerSocket, get the port number, close 
the ServerSocket, return the port number...btw, it is unlikely but 
possible that this port will be grabbed by some other process between 
the time the ServerSocket is closed and the time the socket is opened by 
the caller of getUnusedRandomPort, but this may happen with a custom 
SocketImplFactory anyway) and which only look for ports whicha re not 
used and which are within a range we want (read outside the FIXED_PORT_* 
range (and other ranges like < 1024)). I think using a SocketImplFactory 
will improve the performance and reliability of the tests.

Darryl

On 01/17/2013 12:18 PM, Jim Gish wrote:
> Please review 
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jgish/Bug8006534-getUnusedRandomPort-retry-more/ 
> <http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Ejgish/Bug8006534-getUnusedRandomPort-retry-more/> 
>
>
> TestLibrary.getUnusedPort() attempts to retry getting an ephemeral 
> port 10 times, which is the current number of ports in the reserved 
> port range.  Debugging code added a few weeks back has revealed that 
> intermittent failures in tests using this method are caused when the 
> underlying socket code first returns the first number in the reserved 
> port range.  Subsequent retries result in incrementing the port number 
> by one until reaching the max reserved port number, which just happens 
> to correspond to the 10th attempt, and the code then quits trying.
>
> The proposed fix (one of many possible alternatives, of course) simply 
> retries for twice the number of ports in the range.
>
> Thanks,
>    Jim
>