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, 4 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/synapse/push/httppusher.py b/synapse/push/httppusher.py
index 2cbac571b8..1420d378ef 100644
--- a/synapse/push/httppusher.py
+++ b/synapse/push/httppusher.py
@@ -94,7 +94,10 @@ class HttpPusher(object):
 
     @defer.inlineCallbacks
     def on_started(self):
-        yield self._process()
+        try:
+            yield self._process()
+        except Exception:
+            logger.exception("Error starting http pusher")
 
     @defer.inlineCallbacks
     def on_new_notifications(self, min_stream_ordering, max_stream_ordering):