Hi Steve,
On 11/02/2009 06:42 AM, Steven Whitehouse wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 19:27 -0400, Allen Belletti wrote:
Hi All,
As I've mentioned before, I'm running a two-node clustered mail server
on GFS2 (with RHEL 5.4) Nearly all of the time, everything works
great. However, going all the way back to GFS1 on RHEL 5.1 (I think it
was), I've had occasional locking problems that force a reboot of one or
both cluster nodes. Lately I've paid closer attention since it's been
happening more often.
I'll notice the problem when the load average starts rising. It's
always tied to "stuck" processes, and I believe always tied to IMAP
clients (I'm running Dovecot.) It seems like a file belonging to user
"x" (in this case, "jforrest" will become locked in some way, such that
every IMAP process tied that user will get stuck on the same thing.
Over time, as the user keeps trying to read that file, more& more
processes accumulate. They're always in state "D" (uninterruptible
sleep), and always on "dlm_posix_lock" according to WCHAN. The only way
I'm able to get out of this state is to reboot. If I let it persist for
too long, I/O generally stops entirely.
This certainly seems like it ought to have a definite solution, but I've
no idea what it is. I've tried a variety of things using "find" to
pinpoint a particular file, but everything belonging to the affected
user seems just fine. At least, I can read and copy all of the files,
and do a stat via ls -l.
Is it possible that this is a bug, not within GFS at all, but within
Dovecot IMAP?
Any thoughts would be appreciated. It's been getting worse lately and
thus no fun at all.
Cheers,
Allen
Do you know if dovecot IMAP uses signals at all? That would be the first
thing that I'd look at. The other thing to check is whether it makes use
of F_GETLK and in particular the l_pid field? strace should be able to
answer both of those questions (except the l_pid field of course, but
the chances are it it calls F_GETLK and then sends a signal, its also
using the l_pid field),
I've checked via both strace and grepping the source, and found no
evidence of F_GETLK nor the l_pid field being referenced. Signals don't
appear to play a significant role either; I've managed to snag an strace
-f -p of a "healthy" imap session (ie, dlm_posix_lock briefly appearing
in WCHAN but going away as expected) and I see no signals being used.
By the way, I took advantage of a quiet period early Sunday morning and
ran fsck.gfs2( version 3.0.4) on the two GFS2 filesystems. Both had a
variety of errors although no evidence of major corruption. Since that
completed I've seen no additional "stuck" locks but the sample period is
far too short to tell. Sometimes things work for weeks without issue.
Thanks for your suggestions!
Allen
--
Allen Belletti
allen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 404-894-6221 Phone
Industrial and Systems Engineering 404-385-2988 Fax
Georgia Institute of Technology
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