While I was going through uses of preserve_fn for other PRs, I converted places
which only use the wrapped function once to use run_in_background, to avoid
creating the function object.
There were a bunch of places where we fire off a process to happen in the
background, but don't have any exception handling on it - instead relying on
the unhandled error being logged when the relevent deferred gets
garbage-collected.
This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
- logging on garbage collection is best-effort and may happen some time after
the error, if at all
- it can be hard to figure out where the error actually happened.
- it is logged as a scary CRITICAL error which (a) I always forget to grep for
and (b) it's not really CRITICAL if a background process we don't care about
fails.
So this is an attempt to add exception handling to everything we fire off into
the background.
There's a bug somewhere that causes typing notifications to not be timed
out properly. By adding a paranoia timer and using correct inequalities
notifications should stop being stuck, even if it the root cause hasn't
been fixed.
synapse
This is necessary for replicating the data in synapse to be visible to a
separate service because presence and typing notifications aren't stored
in a database so won't be visible to another process.
This API can be used to either get the raw data by requesting the tables
themselves or to just receive notifications for updates by following the
streams meta-stream.
Returns updates for each table requested a JSON array of arrays with a
row for each row in the table.
Each table is prefixed by a header row with the: name of the table,
current stream_id position for the table, number of rows, number of
columns and the names of the columns.
This is followed by the rows that have been added to the server since
the requester last asked.
The API has a timeout and is hooked up to the notifier so that a slave
can long poll for updates.
