firefox (etc??) probs

[Todd Denniston]

michael wrote, On 05/15/2008 12:14 PM:
> The below turned out to be a problem with the NFS server... that'll
> teach users to mount their /home on a busy server ;)
> 

The client machines wouldn't happen to be mounting the NFS server with soft 
mount would they?
soft should be issuing an I/O error.
hard,intr would allow EINTR.
not sure what hard alone would issue.
a change to hard,intr and retest, might look a bit different.

Of course the problem is not that they have their /home on the busy server... 
it is that they set their Firefox to have a 200MB cache on /home on the busy 
server... might be interesting (and a denial of service) to
LIST=`locate Cache|grep firefox |grep -e Cache$`
for i in $LIST;do \
mv $i $i.bak; mkdir $i ; \
chown root:root $i; chmod og-rwx $i; \
done
and see how much the load goes down on the server.

As I said though, it's a DOS, best to make sure the boss is not doing anything 
"important" while testing, and gives approval.  ff should recreate the Cache 
directory if it is removed I think, otherwise it might be a little tricky to 
get the right permissions back on the dirs.

the following command would probably let you know who has oversized Caches, 
without upsetting the boss.
du -smc `locate Cache|grep firefox |grep -e Cache$` \
  2>&1 |sort -n


And of course gnome caches all it's state on disk, so that NEVER hammers an 
NFS server. :}

> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 19:14 +0100, michael wrote:
>> A colleague running FC8 seems to have intermittent problems starting
>> firefox, particularly from the Gnome menu bar, but also probs starting
>> openoffice. I did an `strace -f` and compared to my nicely working
>> firefox (FC7) and the main diff seems to be they have numerous 'EAGAIN
>> (Resource temporarily unavailable)' msgs in their code (see below) but
>> I'm unsure how to determine what they are referring to so all help
>> welcome! Ta, M
>> ===
>> ... lots of output (replaced hostname with xxxxxx)
>>
>> 16495 uname({sys="Linux", node="xxxxxx.seaes.manchester.ac.uk", ...}) =
>> 0
>> 16495 access("/tmp/.gdmXZD3AU", R_OK)   = 0
>> 16495 open("/tmp/.gdmXZD3AU", O_RDONLY) = 4
>> 16495 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=141, ...}) = 0
>> 16495 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS,
>> -1, 0) = 0x40002000
<SNIP>


-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter