[cvsnt] Re: RCS corruption during tagging

[Arthur Barrett]

Randy,

That last comment should have read:

For one customer alone the repository is 750Mb, 10,000 files and over
half those are binary and I've never seen this problem.

I look forward to getting the extra debugging info.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett


-----Original Message-----
From: cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org [mailto:cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org] On Behalf
Of Randy McCharles
Sent: 17 February 2006 08:49
To: cvsnt at cvsnt.org
Subject: RE: [cvsnt] Re: RCS corruption during tagging


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

Bringing people and ideas together.(tm)


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