In my previous post, I asked you to find the bug in the following code:

This code looks okay, at a glance, but it turns out that this is a really nasty data corruption bug waiting to happen. Here is what the problematic usage looks like:

Do you see the error now?

If the operation will time out, an exception will be raised, but the underlying operation isn’t over. We are using a shared pool, so the buffer we use may be handed over to someone else. At this point, we do something with the buffer, but the pending I/O operation will read data into this buffer, meaning that this is probably going to be garbage in it when we actually use it.

To actually happen, you need to have a timeout operation, reuse of the buffer and the I/O operation completing at just the wrong time. So a sequence of highly unlikely events that would assuredly happen within an hour of pushing something like that to production. For fun, this will reliably happen the moment you have some network issues. So imagine that you have a slow node, which then cause memory corruption, which end up being a visible bug (instead of maybe aborted request) very rarely, and with no indication on how this happened.

How do you fix this? Like this:

This will use a cancellation token, which will cause the operation to be aborted at the stream level, meaning that we can safely reuse values that we passed the underlying stream.

Let us look at the following pieces of code:

public void Consume(MyBooksRequest message)
{
    var user = session.Get<User>(message.UserId);
    
    bus.Reply(new MyBooksResponse
    {
        UserId = message.UserId,
        Timestamp = DateTime.Now,
        Books = user.CurrentlyReading.ToBookDtoArray()
    });
}

public void Consume(MyQueueRequest message)
{
    var user = session.Get<User>(message.UserId);

    bus.Reply(new MyQueueResponse
    {
        UserId = message.UserId,
        Timestamp = DateTime.Now,
        Queue = user.Queue.ToBookDtoArray()
    });
}

public void Consume(MyRecommendationsRequest message)
{
    var user = session.Get<User>(message.UserId);

    bus.Reply(new MyRecommendationsResponse
    {
        UserId = message.UserId,
        Timestamp = DateTime.Now,
        Recommendations = user.Recommendations.ToBookDtoArray()
    });
}

Looking at this, I see that I have a requirement to getting my books, my queues and my recommendations. Looking at the code, can you guess how many queries are being generated to get those?

And can you suggest an optimization?