Rsync lock-up

[jw schultz]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 05:16:11PM -0400, Michael Kohne wrote:
> I'm getting some odd behaviour from rsync - a lockup when doing local
> copies. I tried to search the list archives, but I only came up with a
> couple of hits from 2001 indicating folks thought this (or a similar
> issue) was fixed.
> 
> Situation:
> (OS is RedHat 7.2, Rsync rpm 2.4.6-5 and 2.5.5-1 exhibit the same behaviour)
> rsync is copying on the same machine (local copy). The destination is NOT
> a sub-directory of anything that's being copied. I used xargs to give
> rsync a moderatly large number of files (603). It copies all the files,
> then locks up after the last copy. I can kill it with control-c. Rsync is
> being run from a perl script I wrote which first identifies the files to
> backup, then uses rsync to back them up (hence the large file name list).
> 
> The interesting part is that when I run my backup script from the command
> line, it works fine. The problem comes when I have our program run it (via
> fork & exec, with stdin/out to my program via pipes.) rsync locks up. This
> does NOT happen when I do rsync to a remote server via ssh (making me
> think this is related to the bugs I found in the archive).
> 
> Note that our program is based on pthreads, and uses two sepereate pipes
> to talk to the backup script - one for data going TO the backup script,
> one for data comming FROM the backup script. (Our program is a daemon that
> allows our users to connect to it via a telnet-like program. It then
> presents them with a very cheesy shell they can use to run commands.)
> 
> If anyone can give me a good idea as to what it is I'm doing to screw up
> rsync, I'd appreciate hearing it. I assume it either has something to do
> with the large number of files or with the interesting stdin/out games I
> play.

The large file count on the command-line is curious but i'm
more inclined to think it is the stdin/out/err games.

> My next step will be to play with trying to reduce the number of files I'm
> passing to rsync, and if that doesn't work, I'll try writing some code to
> play with stdin/out until I can get a failure in a smaller environment.
> Other ideas are welcome.

When you discover the cause or at least get a good test case
let us know.

It would be best if you worked with cvs and not an out of
date vendor patched binary.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt