[mythtv-users] Mythbackend keeping files open, disk space not being freed

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Sat Dec 18 03:50:58 UTC 2004


On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 09:39:00PM -0500, Joel Anderson wrote:
> > I just encountered a somewhat serious bug.  I noticed my partition was
> > low on disk space, and deleted some older videos, and while the files
> > were deleted and to du they were gone, to df the space was still used.
> > 
> > In other words, some process had them still open.  And so I killed
> > mythbackend, and the space was freed, and I restarted it.
> > 
> > This was all long after any commercial flaggings were finished.  No
> > transcodes in  play, one frontend running but not watching.
> > 
> > So something in mythbackend was keeping file descriptors open and
> > stopping the OS from releasing the files.
> > 
> > Not seeing any obvious threads -- anybody had this?  I will test again
> > when I have something else to delete, probably later today.
> 
> It's a known issue with 0.16, has been fixed in CVS for a while now.
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/88797
> 

Thanks, don't know why I didn't see that in my searches.   I had not
clued that you should use NFS for the frontend rather than the frontend
protocol, I will look for the docs on doing that.

It was such a major problem I assumed it would be easy to find, I had
not realized it was only coming on those who use an independent
frontend.

Thanks again.  Interesting to read the filesystem debate as well.
I put my system on xfs, but the non-shrinkability of xfs is making
me think if I might consider jfs, reiser or back to ext3.  Not that I
plan to shrink in normal use, but I've been thinking it might make more
sense to do that at times considering how cheap and fast USB-2 external
drive enclosures are.   Slap on a temporary drive, expand the volume
onto it for high-needs (like going away on a trip) and pull it later.

Of course, by the time I need that I suspect we'll see myth support
multiple filesystems for the video spool, and even offline spools.

Problem is, with video volumes now in the 1-2 deciteraybte size (first
time I have used that number!) once you pick your filesystem, you are
stuck with it without a long slog, since copying this much data, even
on today's disk speeds, still is quite a job.


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