Periodic jobs lockf timeout

[Alan Somers]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 3:07 AM, Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
>
> 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.

Are you talking about the lockf in /usr/sbin/periodic?  It already has
a timeout of 0, which should prevent overlapping periodic jobs.  Or is
there some other lockf involved?  Without knowing which lockf you're
talking about, I can't understand your problem.

The anticongestion_sleeptime variable is unrelated to lockf.

-Alan