[openstack-dev] [nova] [glance] How to deal with aborted image read?

Robert Collins robertc at robertcollins.net
Tue Jun 9 00:26:29 UTC 2015


On 9 June 2015 at 07:53, Chris Friesen <chris.friesen at windriver.com> wrote:
> On 06/08/2015 12:30 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
>>
>> On 9 June 2015 at 03:50, Chris Friesen <chris.friesen at windriver.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 06/07/2015 04:22 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hi, original reporter here.
>>>
>>> There's no LB involved.  The issue was noticed in a test lab that is
>>> tight
>>> on disk space.  When an instance failed to boot the person using the lab
>>> tried to delete some images to free up space, at which point it was
>>> noticed
>>> that space didn't actually free up.  (For at least half an hour, exact
>>> time
>>> unknown.)
>>>
>>> I'm more of a nova guy, so could you elaborate a bit on the GC?  Is
>>> something going to delete the ChunkedFile object after a certain amount
>>> of
>>> inactivity? What triggers the GC to run?
>>
>>
>> Ok, updating my theory...  I'm not super familiar with glances
>> innards, so I'm going to call out my assumptions.
>>
>> The ChunkedFile object is in the Nova process. It reads from a local
>> file, so its the issue - and it has a handle onto the image because
>> glance arranged for it to read from it.
>
>
> As I understand it, the ChunkedFile object is in the glance-api process.
> (At least, it's the glance-api process that is holding the open file
> descriptor.)
>
>
>> Anyhow - to answer your question: the iterator is only referenced by
>> the for loop, nothing else *can* hold a reference to it (without nasty
>> introspection hacks) and so as long as the iterator has an appropriate
>> try:finally:, which the filesystem ChunkedFile one does- the file will
>> be closed automatically.
>
>
> From what I understand, the iterator (in the glance-api process) normally
> breaks out of the while loop once the whole file has been read and the
> read() call returns an empty string.
>
> It's not clear to me how an error in the nova process (which causes it to
> stop reading the file from glance-api)  will cause glance-api to break out
> of the while loop in ChunkedFile.__iter__().

AIUI the conclusion of our IRC investigation was:
 - with caching middleware, the fd is freed, just after ~4m.
 - without caching middleware, the fd is freed after ~90s.

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud



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