[Mailman-Developers] What happens with mailman after a crash

Les Niles les at 2pi.org
Tue Jan 27 17:15:04 EST 2004


On 27 Jan 2004 13:40:04 -0500 John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 13:26, Les Niles wrote:
>> Mailman soldiers on just fine.  The problems we've run into are
>> with some of mailman's files getting corrupted because they weren't
>> synced to disk when the machine crashed -- the standard problem
>> with any crash.  I've had to rebuild a couple of list config
>> databases, and toss out a few corrupted pending pickles.  We plan
>> to try the synchronous-write option, do backups (!), and maybe even
>> replace the flakey hardware that's been causing the crashes.
>> 
>
>Doesn't the new SYNC_AFTER_WRITE flag address this issue? Here is the doc
>for it:
>
># This flag causes Mailman to fsync() its data files after writing and
># flushing its contents.  While this ensures the data is written to disk,
># avoiding data loss, it may be a performance killer.  Note that this flag
># affects both message pickles and MailList config.pck files.

Yes, that's what I meant by "synchronous-write option."  We haven't
turned it on yet, mostly because of the warning about performance,
but partially out of laziness since we need to upgrade MM yet
again.

  -les



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