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davidhewitt
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Motivation

Fixes #3223

Solution

From my understanding, it's sufficient for Registry::exit just to call self.try_close() and do local bookkeeping:

  • The attempt to use the thread dispatcher leads directly to the issues observed in tracing & tracing-subscriber have a design defect I believe #3223, and
  • I don't think it's correct to call try_close on the whole Layer stack at this point anyway, a span being exited is not yet ready to close. All that is needed is to decrement the reference count within the current registry.

I've added a test which spawns a thread and enters (and exits, and drops) a span created on a dispatcher not registered to that thread.

Before this patch, the test fails with the span never being closed (because there is no thread dispatcher when the span is exited, and so a reference is leaked in Registry::exit).

With this patch, the bookkeeping demonstrated in the test seems correct to me.

@davidhewitt
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Note that changing Registry::exit to just call self.try_close() is also presumably a performance gain, because there is no need to dispatch through TLS on each span exit.

@vlovich
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vlovich commented Aug 1, 2025

FWIW I can also confirm this fixes the issue I've seen in real-world situations so this seems like a very simple fix that also improves performance. Great job!

@kevinji
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kevinji commented Sep 9, 2025

@jplatte are you able to review this change?

@jplatte
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jplatte commented Sep 9, 2025

Hey, I'm sorry but I don't actually have a good understanding of tracing internals at all. I've just been reviewing and merging PRs that do not need much knowledge of the internals. I'm afraid this will have to wait for @hds.

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tracing & tracing-subscriber have a design defect I believe
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