Re: apache locks up db?

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

.....
>
> This first problem is user error: 'svn merge' cannot merge changes from
> one repository to another. It often creates 'schedule-add' items in the
> working copy that remember where they came from ("add with history")...
> and if they come from a foreign repository, the commit will fail.

thanks for the explanation. I didn't believe it would work, but Mike insisted
and it got us into a state of panic as we were not sure what the problem was and
this was 'big conversion from cvs day' :)

>>but worse after retrying we found we had locked the database out even to
>>recover. Restarting apache worked and allowed the svnadmin recover to work.
>
>
> This sounds like a very different problem. In theory, there should be
> no way for an svn client to cause an apache process to crash or
> disconnect from the database uncleanly. In practice, this seems to be
> pretty true as well. If you've found a way to make that happen, we'd
> love to know how. But that involves getting a lot more detail from you
> and doing some research.
>

I'm quite prepared to assist.

The main problem was doing the above and then finding that the destination
repository had 'gone away' ie the commit failed.

We then had various problems and found that something was wrong with the source
of the merge; we couldn't ls its root folder, but subfolders were ok. I have a
feeling that was the source of the problem. Attempts to fix up that repository
failed ie svnadmin recover hung. We managed to get svnadmin recover to work by
restarting apache. Clearly someone had locked something. I assume somehow using
the commands above we managed to create a loop in the root folder or something.

Please let me know what I can do in the way of research? Unfortunately these are
big repositories bz2 of the hotcopy is 380Mb. I have a snapshot of the source
and can reasonably create another destination.

>
>>However, this makes me worried that apache may not be the safest way to access
>>svn. My boss wants to use https/http as he feels that will allow clients with
>>firewalls access etc etc. Do other svn'ers have experience on this sort of
>>problem? Do the svn modules manage svn databases as long running processes?
>
>
> The svn client opens a single long-running TCP/IP connection to an
> apache process, and then does many HTTP request/repsonses over that
> connection. The apache process keeps the database open throughout the
> connection.

Again thanks for the info.

-- 
Robin Becker
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