The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[micah anderson <address@concealed>]

On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:29:25 -0500, micah <address@concealed> wrote:

> We are not out of disk space, nor out of inodes, the permissions on that
> directory have not changed and the sympa user can write to that
> directory (in fact, I can su to the sympa user and create that file that
> it was complaining about). There are about 51k files in that directory
> (if you include the dot files), its running ext3 filesystem.
> 
> I tried to look into the logs_table in the database to see if I could
> find out more specifically *why* it could not create the file, but there
> was no clear error message.

I modified List.pm send_to_editor() to provide me with a more verbose
return error to see what was going on:

&do_log('err','Unable to create %s: %s', $tmp_dir, $!);

I'm not sure why the return code wasn't being included there, but it
was very useful for me to have it, I'd suggest this be added to future
sympa. 

This told me:

Mar  1 09:20:50 willet sympa(command)[21064]: List::send_to_editor() Unable 
to create 
/address@concealed:
 Too many links

Which is a result of the ext3 upper limit on number of links in a
directory (~32k). Our moderation spool is being cleaned out, and we are
using the default limit of 30 days. The problem is that for the number
of lists we host, and the number of moderation messages that are
pending, we have too many things in this directory.

It seems like perhaps sympa should be instead bucketing directories into
a multi-level hashed structure to reduce the number of directories
stored at each layer.

Until then, I think my only options are to reduce the queue cleanup time
to be less than 30 days, or switch to ext4 :(

micah

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