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authorEelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com>2013-10-16T12·03+0200
committerEelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com>2013-10-16T12·19+0200
commitd05bf044441dbf8e000036d545df9689bdec0b72 (patch)
treebe0d4b70027bd6c2b11fc00cf67612db3391844e /doc
parentc1994fecf9f9ea129f6164db92ad242e392d987c (diff)
Treat SQLITE_PROTOCOL as SQLITE_BUSY
In the Hydra build farm we fairly regularly get SQLITE_PROTOCOL errors
(e.g., "querying path in database: locking protocol").  The docs for
this error code say that it "is returned if some other process is
messing with file locks and has violated the file locking protocol
that SQLite uses on its rollback journal files."  However, the SQLite
source code reveals that this error can also occur under high load:

  if( cnt>5 ){
    int nDelay = 1;                      /* Pause time in microseconds */
    if( cnt>100 ){
      VVA_ONLY( pWal->lockError = 1; )
      return SQLITE_PROTOCOL;
    }
    if( cnt>=10 ) nDelay = (cnt-9)*238;  /* Max delay 21ms. Total delay 996ms */
    sqlite3OsSleep(pWal->pVfs, nDelay);
  }

i.e. if certain locks cannot be not acquired, SQLite will retry a
number of times before giving up and returing SQLITE_PROTOCOL.  The
comments say:

  Circumstances that cause a RETRY should only last for the briefest
  instances of time.  No I/O or other system calls are done while the
  locks are held, so the locks should not be held for very long. But
  if we are unlucky, another process that is holding a lock might get
  paged out or take a page-fault that is time-consuming to resolve,
  during the few nanoseconds that it is holding the lock.  In that case,
  it might take longer than normal for the lock to free.
  ...
  The total delay time before giving up is less than 1 second.

On a heavily loaded machine like lucifer (the main Hydra server),
which often has dozens of processes waiting for I/O, it seems to me
that a page fault could easily take more than a second to resolve.
So, let's treat SQLITE_PROTOCOL as SQLITE_BUSY and retry the
transaction.

Issue NixOS/hydra#14.
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