Improve exception handling for background processes

There were a bunch of places where we fire off a process to happen in the
background, but don't have any exception handling on it - instead relying on
the unhandled error being logged when the relevent deferred gets
garbage-collected.

This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
 - logging on garbage collection is best-effort and may happen some time after
   the error, if at all
 - it can be hard to figure out where the error actually happened.
 - it is logged as a scary CRITICAL error which (a) I always forget to grep for
   and (b) it's not really CRITICAL if a background process we don't care about
   fails.

So this is an attempt to add exception handling to everything we fire off into
the background.

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/synapse/app/user_dir.py b/synapse/app/user_dir.py
index 5f845e80d1..5ba7e9b416 100644
--- a/synapse/app/user_dir.py
+++ b/synapse/app/user_dir.py
@@ -39,10 +39,10 @@ from synapse.storage.engines import create_engine
 from synapse.storage.user_directory import UserDirectoryStore
 from synapse.util.caches.stream_change_cache import StreamChangeCache
 from synapse.util.httpresourcetree import create_resource_tree
-from synapse.util.logcontext import LoggingContext, preserve_fn
+from synapse.util.logcontext import LoggingContext, run_in_background
 from synapse.util.manhole import manhole
 from synapse.util.versionstring import get_version_string
-from twisted.internet import reactor
+from twisted.internet import reactor, defer
 from twisted.web.resource import NoResource
 
 logger = logging.getLogger("synapse.app.user_dir")
@@ -164,7 +164,14 @@ class UserDirectoryReplicationHandler(ReplicationClientHandler):
             stream_name, token, rows
         )
         if stream_name == "current_state_deltas":
-            preserve_fn(self.user_directory.notify_new_event)()
+            run_in_background(self._notify_directory)
+
+    @defer.inlineCallbacks
+    def _notify_directory(self):
+        try:
+            yield self.user_directory.notify_new_event()
+        except Exception:
+            logger.exception("Error notifiying user directory of state update")
 
 
 def start(config_options):