random exception driving me crazy: SecurityError (Insecure: can't modify array)

Hi all, I'm running into a very strange but incredibly annoying problem that I just can't seem to solve.

The exception is occurring from a seemingly innocuous line in my code, a simple 'logger.warn("some debug information")'. The backtrace follows:

SecurityError (Insecure: can't modify array)         [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/buffered_logger.rb:68:in `<<'         [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/buffered_logger.rb:68:in `add'         [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/buffered_logger.rb:75:in `warn'         [RAILS_ROOT]/app/models/order.rb:244:in `process_with_active_merchant'         [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor/plugins/acts_as_state_machine/lib/acts_as_state_machine.rb:162:in `call'

The line in my model class, order.rb, that causes the exception is the following:

logger.warn("Processing order with payment gateway")

Now, I could probably just remove the offending log line to fix the problem, but this bothers me, since it may point to a larger problem that I'm not aware of, which I 'd rather not ignore. What makes this problem even more difficult to solve is that it doesn't happen consistently and is very difficult to reproduce. It seems to only happen after my mongrel instances have been running for a few hours and are each using over 100 megs of memory (maybe there's some memory leak or thrashing or something that's causing this to happen). I've googled for the error and can't seem to find much information, nor why it would be thrown from a Rails standard library file. I've tested this both on edge Rails 8117 and also a more recent edge Rails 8927 with no difference.

When I restart my mongrel cluster, everything works fine, orders are processed, no exceptions are thrown. But after a few hours, maybe a day of running on the production site, I start getting the 'SecurityError (Insecure: can't modify array)' message as described above (it happens at the same place each time)

My next guess is that it could possibly have something to do with using acts_as_state_machine, which I'm going to remove and see if it changes anything.

If anyone has any suggestions or advice, please let me know. I've been trying to fix this for over a week and haven't made any progress.

For those interested, the following is the code that leads up to the error. It's pretty simple stuff, we attempt to save the order, and in an after_create method in the Order model, we charge the user's credit card (using a transition from acts_as_state_machine). If we can charge it successfully, we save the order, otherwise, we raise an exception and display an error message to the user.

orders_controller.rb

def create   # populate order details (ommitted for brevity)

  begin     if @order.save       # display successful message, redirect somewhere     else       # user probably forgot to enter some info, display error message     end   rescue     # if we get here, then an exception must have been raised while     # processing the credit card with active merchant     logger.warn("Error occurred while attempting to save order")     # render some page with warning message   end end

order.rb

# we use acts_as_state_machine to provide order state acts_as_state_machine :initial => :pending, :column => :status

# order has been created, but no payment has been received state :pending

# process the payment with active_merchant state :processing_payment, :after => :process_with_active_merchant

# charge the user's credit card event :process_payment do   transitions :from => :pending, :to => :processing_payment end

def after_create   # the following method raises an exception if we fail to charge the users   # credit card, prevents the order from being saved.   self.process_payment!

  # some other post-processing tasks   self.send_order_to_distributor!

  self.complete! end

def process_with_active_merchant   # the following line causes a SecurityError (Insecure: can't modify array) exception   logger.warn("Processing order with payment gateway")

  gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::AuthorizedNetGateway.new({:login => API_LOGIN_ID, :password => TRANSACTION_KEY})

  response = gateway.purchase(self.total_price, @credit_card, options)

  if response.success?     logger.warn("Successfully charged credit card with #{self.total_price}: #{response.message}")     self.transaction_id = response.authorization     self.save   else     logger.warn("Failed to charge credit card")     raise OrderFailedException.new(response.params['response_reason_code']), response.message   end

end

Thanks,

Mike

Hey Mike,

Any update on this? I'm seeing something similar as well with acts_as_state_machine

?

Mike Garey wrote:

Rehashing an old message. I found a solution to this a while ago but never responded to my original message. Well, better late than never! Hopefully this will help someone in the future from wasting the amount of time that I did.

The problem turned out to be a bug with using self.method(action).call in acts_as_state_machine. To fix it, I removed self.method(action).call from run_transition_action(action) method in acts_as_state_machine.rb, and replaced it with self.send(action), since self.method(action) was causing the SecurityError (Insecure: can't modify array).

Here's two other links from people who have run into the same problem in the past:

http://cmms.norfello.com/cmms/ticket/445 http://code.google.com/p/dry-scaffold/source/browse/dry_scaffold/CHANGELOG

This issue existed in revision 66 of the acts_as_state_machine from here:

http://elitists.textdriven.com/svn/plugins/acts_as_state_machine/trunk/lib/acts_as_state_machine.rb

I'm not sure if it still exists in the github version.

Mike