Possible patch to cure CGI's not finding data for objects in status.dat

Andreas Ericsson ae at op5.se
Mon Aug 10 10:28:57 CEST 2009


Cary Petterborg wrote:
> I have one question and one observation in addition to what I already
> said....
> 
> Question: In the case of the web server and nagios being on the same
> system, how much is an fsync() really going affect the performance of
> the system?

That depends on the filesystem, the disks and the motherboard design.
In your case, it also depends on the NFS server and client. Some NFS
servers (and/or clients) may also ignore the fsync() call and just
claim everything is written even when it isn't.


> Can someone "quantify" the impact of a single fsync? (I
> guess that is technically a second question.) If it were to do a
> sync() (where all the open files are checked to ensure that they are
> sync'd) instead of an fsync(), I would definitely agree - much bigger
> impact. But, the single fsync at the end of writing a file should not
> be of any real significance, except in the case where it means that
> the data is actually there where it should be if it *is* done (e.g.
> my case).
> 

The impact is, potentially, 2 * filesize / disk writespeed once every
few seconds. In short; It's hardware and config size dependant.

> 
> Observation:
> 
> I think that the retention.dat and other files that are important to
> retain across crashes would definitely benefit from the fsync. Though
> nagios would still work across such a failure, I would rather that
> data be preserved properly, especially when we have a retention.dat
> file that is 40MB and the rescheduling, etc. would be handled so much
> more effectively. So for what it is worth, I think it important that
> those files be fsync'd.
> 

When things are crashing, fsync() is no guarantee, and it only helps
very little on a journalled filesystem.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
on peace.

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