[Info-vax] Are queue manager updates written to disk immediately ?

[Paul Sture]

In article <kk948d$mju$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:

> BTW, it also occurred to me after my last batch of responses that if
> a window exists during job rundown when the queue manager thinks the
> job is still active even though the log file is complete, then the job
> should have been marked with the system failed during execution status
> you would normally get in that situation upon system restart.
> 
> That makes me think nothing about the job actually starting was written
> to the queue manager database on disk even though a full logfile was
> written to those same disks. (The logfile was on a different disk, but
> that disk was attached to the same controller.)

That started me thinking about the batch job restart mechanism.

From

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/731final/6489/6489pro_046.html#exch_58

"If the system fails while your batch job is executing, your job does 
not complete. When the system recovers and the queue is restarted, your 
job is aborted and the next job in the queue is executed."

Which makes your incident sound like a bug.  The information that the 
job was running didn't make it back to disk so that the job could be 
aborted on the queue restart.

FWIW I did a fair bit of testing of the batch restart functionality back 
in VAX days, without problems.  However given the stuff I was running 
then I could never justify the extra effort to use the functionality in 
a production environment. 

I am slightly wondering that if you had had restart checkpoints built 
into your procedure that might have forced some write back to the queue 
manager database, but a check_queues job doesn't sound like a lengthy 
procedure to me.

And with the benefit of hindsight, that testing was restricted to things 
like doing a console halt then reboot rather than a complete power fail.

> I've now logged the issue with HP and they are currently looking at it.

-- 
Paul Sture