Re: Massive repository corruptions

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 13, 2010, 03:23 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTilXQ3VgPjihf0pjt4QPN-nCjwAWyHwoosLMeRpH@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100713015600.GA29392@nibiru.local>

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 9:56 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I've just reorganized several repositories (eg. splitted off a large
> repo into several small ones), and then I had massive corruptions
> (broken pack files) in the new repos (after they already had been clean).
>
> Maybe it has something to do with a cronjob which frequently GC's
> all the repos, and it could get even worse if the fs sometimes
> goes full within this process.
>
> Could multiple GCs running on the same repo cause this ?

Multiple simultaneous gc's shouldn't be a problem - git locks things as it needs them. Plus, git only removes objects after it has safely created a new packfile that contains them. Maybe a filesystem filling up could cause a problem, but git should be detecting that if it happens (maybe there's a bug that causes it to not notice, though).

You could experience corruption if your computer crashed before everything was synced to disk.

Do you know which packfiles are corrupted? Does 'git index-pack' on the files reveal anything?

Be sure to make a backup copy of your corrupted repositories before doing any experiments, or you might accidentally fix the problem and make it harder to trace.

Good luck.

Avery