Periodic jobs lockf timeout

[Borja Marcos]

Hi,

I’ve come across a problem with the “daily” security job. On an overloaded system with lots of ZFS datasets,
lots of files, heavy system load and, to add insult to injury, a ZFS crub going on the find’s issued by the
periodic checks can take forever. They can take so long, I have found several lockf’s waiting.

Is it sane to have an unlimited timeout for lockf? Probably it would be better to have at least a configurable
timeout for each cathegory. It’s really unlikely to see an overlap for a weekly or monthly job, but for daily
jobs it would be good to have a sane default, say, an hour or two.

There’s even a parameter on /etc/defaults/periodic.conf but it seems it’s not used right now.

# Max time to sleep to avoid causing congestion on download servers
anticongestion_sleeptime=3600


The alternative would be to have defaults for a sane timeout for each cathegory, like

daily_lockf_timeout
weekly_lockf_timeout
monthly_lockf_timeout

Thoughts? It’s pretty simple to do and overlapping periodic jobs are really useless.






Borja.