# acp: Poll the client connection future on a dedicated thread \(\#62259\) · gitcafe/zed

[View on GitCafe](https://git.cafe/gitcafe/zed/commit/9bde578ef5afa84920c4300af25f9dee31c96fcf)

Repository: [gitcafe/zed](https://git.cafe/gitcafe/zed)

Visibility: public

Requested revision: 9bde578ef5afa84920c4300af25f9dee31c96fcf

Requested commit: 9bde578ef5afa84920c4300af25f9dee31c96fcf

Commit: 9bde578ef5afa84920c4300af25f9dee31c96fcf

Tree: 445eee7b178f91b2454211d7f9854f699cdcba8d

Author: Kunall Banerjee

Committer: GitHub

## Message

```
acp: Poll the client connection future on a dedicated thread (#62259)

Some context behind this change: I’ve been meaning to look into this
because I kept running into this crash when working on
[other](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/61040) fixes.
Everything worked fine in dev builds, right up until you tried to create
a new Agent Thread using an ACP adapter. The crash reports in this
instance were throwing me off: I was seeing different things each time.

So, I had Fable look into this. It did so by binary-searching the
minimum thread stack on which a probe replicating Zed’s exact handler
chain can dispatch one message. Full methodology, probe source, and raw
numbers can be found in [this
gist](https://gist.github.com/yeskunall/2ac2b00f51389d9388d607974f6f8a04).
The results of the probe are as follows:

| SDK | Minimum stack (dev profile) | vs. 512 KiB GCD budget |
|---|---|---|
| 1.3.0 | 409,600–413,696 B | fit, ~100 KiB headroom |
| 2.0.0 | 507,904–512,000 B | entire budget before runtime overhead |

The oversized frames are monomorphized into `agent_servers`, not the SDK
crate -- a `[profile.dev.package]` opt-level override on
`agent-client-protocol` does **not** fix this (see gist), and optimized
builds collapse the frames entirely, which is why only dev builds
crashed. It found that the real signature is `fault_address ==
stack_pointer` on a `com.apple.root.default-qos` thread inside the ACP
dispatch specialization, which I then had it verify across six local
`.ips` reports. It seems in #61570, we pushed the dispatch chain past
the GCD budget, explained further below:

`AcpConnection::stdio` polled the ACP client connection future via
`background_spawn`, which on macOS executes runnables on
[GCD’s](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DISPATCH) global-queue
workers. Those threads have kernel-fixed, unconfigurable [512 KiB
stacks](https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/libpthread/blob/42d026df5b07825070f60134b980a1ec2552dfee/kern/kern_internal.h#L154).
In unoptimized builds, the SDK’s chained-handler dispatch needs **~0.5
MiB of stack per inbound message** (again, see linked gist), so the
first message overflows the guard page and takes the process down.

Therefore, this 512 KiB constraint is **macOS-only**. Linux doesn’t use
GCD -- GPUI [spawns its own `std::thread`
workers](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/82878540b5410b288a2c92cb9ee5675533e4d807/crates/gpui_linux/src/linux/dispatcher.rs#L39)
([2 MiB Rust
default](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/59807616e1fa2540724bfbac14d7976d7e4a3860/library/std/src/sys/thread/unix.rs#L26)).
Windows uses [the OS thread
pool](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/82878540b5410b288a2c92cb9ee5675533e4d807/crates/gpui_windows/src/dispatcher.rs#L68),
which [inherits the executable’s stack
reserve](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/sdk-api/blob/4502fff176b3b56beddb6a63c9f980377b11ba9b/sdk-api-src/content/threadpoolapiset/nf-threadpoolapiset-setthreadpoolstackinformation.md?plain=1#L58)
-- [1 MB linker
default](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/win32/blob/2eb6588c6703d31599285bbb06563c3d41b57590/desktop-src/ProcThread/thread-stack-size.md?plain=1#L17),
but Zed already bumps it to 8 MiB in
[crates/zed/build.rs:88](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/82878540b5410b288a2c92cb9ee5675533e4d807/crates/zed/build.rs#L88)
(see [TODO
comment](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/82878540b5410b288a2c92cb9ee5675533e4d807/crates/zed/build.rs#L87)).

---

Release Notes:

- N/A
```

## Parents

- [9f164a0d2eec5805fc66a9e9a8d624fbf0ef24e1](https://git.cafe/gitcafe/zed/commit/9f164a0d2eec5805fc66a9e9a8d624fbf0ef24e1?format=markdown)

[Source at this commit](https://git.cafe/gitcafe/zed/tree/9bde578ef5afa84920c4300af25f9dee31c96fcf?format=markdown)