Production symptom: previews of all types (pdf/pyvips/onlyoffice) start
hitting the 10s timeout and never recover until server restart, while the
rest of the server stays healthy.
Root cause (reproduced on Python 3.12): workers were spawned with
stderr=PIPE that nothing drained after startup. Once the OS pipe buffer
filled from accumulated worker tracebacks and library warnings, asyncio
flow control stopped the parent reading it and the worker blocked forever
mid-request on a stderr write. The 10s timeout then fired, but
_replace_worker hung forever in proc.wait() even after kill() — the
flow-control-paused pipe transport never sees EOF — permanently wedging
one dispatcher per stuck worker. Once all dispatchers were stuck, every
preview request timed out. Restart cleared it.
Fixes:
- Spawn workers with inherited stderr (stderr=None) so worker diagnostics
go straight to the server log and no undrained pipe can exist.
- Bound proc.wait() in worker kill() with a 5s grace timeout so a wedged
transport can never hang a dispatcher; log the worker pid instead.
- Guard the dispatch loop with an outer exception handler so a dispatcher
can never die silently and shrink pool capacity.
- Retry failed worker replacement spawns with 1s-30s backoff instead of
silently shrinking the pool.
- Fix latent crash: except-tuple referenced msgspec.json.DecodeError,
which does not exist in the installed msgspec; any protocol failure
would itself raise AttributeError. Use msgspec.DecodeError.
- Worker: redirect Python-level sys.stdout to stderr in persistent mode
and keep the raw buffer solely for the binary protocol, so a library
print() can never corrupt the command channel again (cf. the pymupdf
deprecation warning that crashed workers at startup).
- Worker: close the pymupdf document explicitly in process_pdf.
- Log worker pid on timeout/protocol/checksum failures, and log failed
kills and replacement retries, for future production diagnostics.
Add tests/test_preview_pool.py with an end-to-end regression recreating
the wedged-worker setup (piped, undrained stderr) plus kill-grace,
respawn-retry and dispatcher-survival tests.
LeoVasanko
7b1c6f6772