719952 - [Meta] Storage issues on remote profiles (SMB, NFS, AFP)

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Storage, defect, P5)

Description

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Just a meta to track common issues on profiles stored on remote shared locations.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Some known facts:
- adding "nolock" to NFS partitions helps solving issues with 0-sized bytes
- SQLite has vfs for different kind of locking strategies, unix-afp and unix-dotfile the two most useful ones in problematic cases. Though these must be enabled when opening the database, and have different side issues: they may be slower than the default and in case of app crash locks may not be removed, so the app has to detect crashes and clean them. For these reasons we can't just swap the vfs by default, though we may figure out a way to detect the fs or provide prefs to force a specific one (provided we can cleanup locks on crash).

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

ehr, I clearly meant "0-bytes sized files"

Comment 3

[mars]

Corrupts also in Virtual Box's shared folders!

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Before I forget, as a workaround on unix-like systems, it's possible to set storage.nfs_filesystem preference to true. This was added in Semptember 2012 with a patch in bug 433129.
This will force using the unix-excl locking style, that should solve most of the network filesystems locking issues.
There is no known workaround on Windows so far.

Comment 6

[Roger]

I am serving home directories to my OS X clients over netatalk, and the storage.nfs_filesystem setting seems to make the situation worse.

Currently it's hit or miss whether someone will be able to save bookmarks. When someone is unable to save bookmarks I can generate a new profile and will be able to save bookmarks until Firefox is relaunched after relaunching you can add/delete bookmarks but no changes are saved and everything reverts.

When I enable storage.nfs_filesystem setting it appears as no data is being read from my places.sqlite. Before enabling this setting user's could at least see their existing bookmarks and history after enabling Firefox loads, but they see no bookmarks, and no browsing history.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

(In reply to frutiger from comment #6)
> When I enable storage.nfs_filesystem setting it appears as no data is being
> read from my places.sqlite. Before enabling this setting user's could at
> least see their existing bookmarks and history after enabling Firefox loads,
> but they see no bookmarks, and no browsing history.

Is the same file being accessed by multiple profiles/computers at the same time? The only thing that storage.nfs_filesystem does is using the "unix-excl" vfs layer, then only one process at a time can then access the database. See http://www.sqlite.org/vfs.html

Comment 8

[Roger]

The user account is only logged into one workstation. I verified by running an lsof on the netatalk server looking for open places.sqlite files. When storage.nfs_filesystem is set to false I immediately see 2 firefox processes accessing the database.

I am running Firefox 17.0.7ESR on 10.6.8 and 10.8.4 I have also seen this same behavior on FF 23

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

(In reply to Roger from comment #8)
> When
> storage.nfs_filesystem is set to false I immediately see 2 firefox processes
> accessing the database.

2 processes? that's interesting, only the main process should access the database. This may explain the issue but I'm not sure what's causing it.