Re: Does nautilus hang if an NFS server is unreachable?

["Peter O'Shea" <peter oshea analog com>]

On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 06:46, Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 18:36, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 12:40:49PM -0500, Peter O'Shea wrote: 
> > > Is nautilus waiting for this server to become available?  Isn't there a
> > > timeout specified somewhere?
> > 
> > The timeout is normally in the kernel. Design bug in NFS; if you touch
> > an NFS filesystem that's hung, then your app hangs, and there is no
> > way to avoid it. (Other than using threads.)
> 
> 	It's worse than that - there's no way of knowing reliably whether a
> file is on an NFS mount AFAIR, short of statting it - which causes the
> thread to block permanantly.
> 
> 	Gnome-vfs uses a thread-pool - and as sys-calls are made on the NFS
> mount, they destroy thread after thread until everything is jammed up
> solid.
> 
> 	Of course - there are some partial hacks that can be done to improve
> the situation generally, but they are all partial ones. eg. we could try
> and allocate thread pools / dispatch jobs based on the path prefix; eg.
> all of '/home' in 3 threads, all of '/usr' in another 2, and 5 for
> random other things [ or something ]. But it's not so clear how to make
> that work well :-) a nice simple solution that detected 'slow' prefixes,
> and limited their thread swallowing potential may help but ...
> 
> 	HTH,
> 
> 		Michael.

So is the cause in gnome-vfs?  I'd like to file a bug on this, realizing
that there may not be an immediate, perfect fix.  


-- 
Peter O'Shea, Staff Product/Test Engineer
Analog Devices - Precision Converters / Digital Audio Group
820 Woburn St. MS 627, Wilmington, MA 01887
Phone: (781) 937-1206