Task: Implement session cancellation

Table of Contents

This page documents a task in the Session lifecycle follow-up story. It captures the goal, current status, acceptance, and any notes or results.

Goal

Cancel all active sessions when the server stops, so it can shut down cleanly under SIGINT or programmatic shutdown. Critical for container orchestration and service restarts.

Status

Field Value
State DONE
Parent story Session lifecycle follow-up
Now Completed 2025-12-04.
Waiting on None.
Next None.
Last touched 2025-12-04

Acceptance

  • Server can stop cleanly with multiple active sessions running.
  • All session I/O operations cancelled when server::stop() is called.
  • No indefinite hangs during shutdown.
  • Sessions log their cancellation for observability.

Plan

(Plan was distilled into the parent story's * Decisions and cleared when the task closed.)

Notes

  • Total time spent in v0: ~2:42.
  • Important pivot: original plan used Boost.Asio's hierarchical cancellation_signal model — but cancellation_signal contains exactly ONE slot that holds ONE handler at a time, so multiple sessions calling slot.assign() overwrite each other. Tests showed only 1/3 sessions cancelled; the Deepseek-suggested idiomatic example segfaulted.
  • Final solution: explicit session management. Server maintains std::list<std::shared_ptr<session>> protected by a mutex; sessions added/removed on create/complete; server::stop() explicitly calls session::stop() on each active session; session::stop() closes the connection, causing pending I/O to fail.
  • Gemini code review pass also caught a race in main.cpp (redundant signal handler) and an unclean connection-state path in client.cpp on read failure.

Result

Server shuts down cleanly with multiple sessions; all 3/3 sessions properly cancelled in tests; race + clean-state issues fixed via Gemini review.

Emacs 29.1 (Org mode 9.6.6)