Monthly Archives: June 2012

GlusterFS sys admin overview

Here is another interesting video from Linuxconf Japan 2012, below Dustin Black provides an overview of Gluster from a system administrator’s point of view.

The topics covered in this 1 hour presentation include:

  • An overview of GlusterFS and Red Hat Storage
  • A look at the logic behind the software
  • How to scale using GlusterFS
  • Redundancy and Fault Tolerance
  • Accessing your data
  • General system administration tasks
  • Real-world use cases for Gluster
  • Q and A

Using strace to debug issues with apache

Today I had to track down the cause of an issue we were having with a server where shortly after restarting the server, requests would start to hang, and the number of Apache processes seemed to be growing rather large, rather quickly.

I started out using Apache’s mod_status to get some details about the state of each process.

I noticed that many of the processes ended up  in a ‘”W”  or “Sending Reply” state.  I choose a random Apache process and fired up ‘strace’ to try to get some more information:

server7:/root# strace -p 11574
Process 11574 attached – interrupt to quit
flock(26, LOCK_EX <unfinished …>

This process was stuck waiting for an exclusive lock on some file.  I used ‘readlink’ to find out the name of the file in question:

server7:/root# readlink /proc/11574/fd/26
/mnt/Pages/xml/0/1/list1055.xml

Once I had the name of the file I used ‘lsof’ to see if there were any other processes trying to access that file as well:

server7:/root#lsof |grep list1055.xml
httpd 11574 nobody 26w REG 0,31 4232 925874559 /mnt/Pages/xml/0/1/list1055.xml (storage1.npr.org:/files/data)
httpd 11579 nobody 26w REG 0,31 4232 925874559 /mnt/Pages/xml/0/1/list1055.xml (storage1.npr.org:/files/data)
httpd 11629 nobody 26w REG 0,31 4232 925874559 /mnt/Pages/xml/0/1/list1055.xml (storage1.npr.org:/files/data)

Here we have several other process waiting for an exclusive lock on the file as well.

At this point it appears as though a recent code change maybe the cause of this issue…however a closer look at the recent source code commits will be required to know for sure.

What’s new in GlusterFS 3.3?

Here is a link to a talk given by John Mark Walker at this year’s LinuxCon Japan, in which he discusses some of the internal details of the Gluster 3.3 release.

A few of the new features discussed during the presentation are:

  • UFO (universal file and object storage)
  • HDFS compatibility
  • Proactive self-heal
  • Granular locking
  • Quorum enforcement (for resolving split-brain scenarios)