[cvsnt] Re: RCS corruption during tagging

Randy McCharles RandyMcCharles at smarttech.com
Thu Feb 16 21:49:17 GMT 2006


I posted this back in December and this appears to be something unique to our installation.
Suggestions of disk failure or OS problems do not appear to be the cause.
So I've monitored the failures (which occur sporadically) and have a better idea of what is happening.

Apparently this is not a tagging-specific problem. We have now had several instances where the checked out copy is corrupted, but the repository is fine... until the corrupted file is checked back in. My best guess is that the temporary file copy made on the server is somehow being corrupted and the damage moves out from there (explaining how tagging files on the server and checking-out corrupt files from an uncorrupt repository can result in the same problem.) This appears to only happen with very large atomic operations. (Is an out-of-memory problem breaking the program logic? We have 1 GB Ram) Corrupted files are themselves usually very large and are almost always binary files. The corruption takes the form of a large chunk of one file (i.e. 800 bytes) overwriting a an equivalent section of another file. The size of the corrupted file doesn't appear to change, although there have been a couple of file shrinkages when the corruption was at the end of the file.

This problem began happening when we set up a 2.5.03.2151 (Scorpio) Windows 2003 SP1 server.
After testing the new server (with small test modules), we migrated several modules (including 2 large ones) from our older 2.0.51c server.
Within 2 weeks we began noticing file corruption in the 2 large modules on the new server.

Any help in this area is much appreciated. At this point we are looking at blowing away our file history and starting over on a new installation (which for obvious reasons is not a happy thing to do.)

Randy McCharles

SMART Technologies Inc.

Senior Software Developer

Tel. 403.802.3347  Fax 403.229.2531
randymccharles at smarttech.com
http://www.smarttech.com

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