Invisible race conditionsThe async query

time to read 1 min | 195 words

This issue was reported to the mailing list with a really scary error: UseAfterFree detected! Attempt to return memory from previous generation, Reset has already been called and the memory reused!

I initially read it as an error that is raised from the server, which raised up all sort of flags and caused us to immediately try to track down what is going on.

Here is the code that would reproduce this:


And a key part of that is that this is not happening on the server, but on the client. You now have all the information required to see what the error is.

Can you figure it out?

The problem is that this method returns a Task, but it isn’t an async method. In other words, we return a task that is still running from ToListAsync, but because we aren’t awaiting on it, the session’s dispose is going to run, and by the time the server request completes and is ready to actually do something with the data that it go, we are already disposed and we get this error.

The solution? Turn this into an async method and await on the ToListAsync() before disposing the session.

More posts in "Invisible race conditions" series:

  1. (02 Jan 2018) The cache has poisoned us
  2. (27 Dec 2017) The sometimes failing script
  3. (26 Dec 2017) The async query