[cvsnt] CVS HEAD stuck?!?

Mon Jul 2 13:41:58 BST 2007

Thanks Bo.  I think that's a good idea.  The trick will be finding a 
reasonable time to do it.  I'll start some monitors now and see if I can 
find a slow spot.  Unfortunately, with worldwide development teams, 4:00 
AM here is the middle of the day for someone.  But perhaps I can find a 
window on the weekend.

Thanks
chuck

Bo Berglund wrote:
> FWIW:
> I also have zombies appearing from time to time, but they are orders of
> magnitude less frequent now than a few years back.
> But they still happen....
> My diagnostic is that they appear more often if a large cvs operation
> fails because of things like disk or network errors. Once stopped the
> cvs process that was running at the time will never end by itself and it
> will lock certain parts of the repository, such as a particular file or
> directory.
> Now the chance of getting another zombie is higher because it seems like
> a new cvs operation that collides with the zombie can easily get to
> zombie state itself.
> 
> We work almost 100% through WinCvs so the zombie creation might be
> connected to this process on the client side.
> 
> Anyway, years ago I set up a scheduled task on the CVS server that runs
> at 4.00 AM every night and kills all cvs processes running at the time
> (kill cvs.exe). You need to use a kill program that can elevate to the
> needed level to kill the cvs.exe process. I got mine from SysInternals.
> 
> After this we have no problems anymore.
> 
> But of course our server is not that busy, and especially at 4:00 in the
> morning we are guaranteed noone is working. To safeguard the system you
> might want to use a batch file like this:
> 
> net stop cvsnt
> kill cvs.exe
> net start cvsnt
> 
> Schedule it to run at the time of least cvs traffic every day.
> 
> This way you won't hit operations in the middle and kill valid cvs.exe
> processes.
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Bo Berglund