Bug #20587
Updated by ivoanjo (Ivo Anjo) 4 months ago
Hey! I work for Datadog on the Ruby profiler part of the [`datadog` (previously `ddtrace`)](https://github.com/datadog/dd-trace-rb) gem. While I was investigating https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20586, I spotted that there's a number of cases where, in `dir.c`, blocking system calls are being made (e.g. `readdir()`, ~~`opendir()`~~, ... see comments for more detailed list...) `opendir()`, etc) without releasing the GVL. This means that if they block for a long time (as happens in the gcsfuse example in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20586 ), the Ruby VM will just be blocked and not make any progress. The combination of not releasing the GVL + slow system calls actually makes the issue in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20586 more likely to happen with the Datadog profiler, although even if the code releases the GVL the underlying issue could still happen, and this is why I decided to file this bug separately.