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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-04-18, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
> In article <kkoss5$ije$1 at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>,
>  Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>
>> Simon can correct me if I understood things wrong, but this is my 
>> understanding:
>> 
>> Job X ran.
>> Job X submitted job Y for running tomorrow.
>> System crash
>> Job X ran again.
>> Job X submitted job Z for running tomorrow.
>> Job X finished
>> 
>> Job Y disappeared. Job Z exists as expected. Job X got two log files 
>> from the two runs. Job X would appear to have completed both times.
>> 

Yes, this is correct. It was a power failure instead of a system crash
but that does not make any difference to the sequence of events.

>> My guess is that job X was rerun because it didn't finish, but that is 
>> perhaps not a good enough explanation for the rerun.
>> There is no obvious explanation at all for job Y not being around.
>> 
>> The "best" explanation might just be that the quemanager work file was 
>> not updated at all, so job X would appear to not have run at all. Thus 
>> the run after the reboot again, and also the loss of job Y.
>

This is still what I think happened as well.

I still think this was queue manager specific. If something at VMS level
or at hardware level was wrongly deferring writes to disk (everything is
write through), then the log file should not have been written away either.

> As I understand it, the queue manager file wasn't even updated to 
> reflect that job X had started, let alone finished.  According to the 
> document I quoted up thread, running jobs should be aborted when the 
> machine comes back
>

Yes, I would also have expected to see the job retained with the usual
"system failed during execution" message if the job starting had been
written away to the disk based queue manager database.

BTW, the HP support person handling this still has not had a response
from the HP people upstream yet so either they don't understand the
problem or they have duplicated it and are wondering what to do about
it...

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world