I use MPICH2. When I launch processes with mpiexec, the failure of one process will crash all other processes. How to avoid this?
In MPICH, there is a flag called -disable-auto-cleanup which will prevent the process manager from automatically cleaning up all processes when a single process fails.
However, MPI itself does not have much support for fault tolerance and this is something that the Fault Tolerance Working Group is working on adding in a future version of the MPI Standard.
For now, the best you can do is change the default MPI Error Handler away from MPI_ERRORS_ARE_FATAL, which causes all processes to abort, to something else like MPI_ERRORS_RETURN which would return the error code to the application and allow it to do something else. However, you're not likely to be able to communicate anymore after a failure has occurred, especially if you are trying to use collective communication.
I have a multithreaded process running on RHEL6.x (64bit).
I find that the process hangs and some threads (of the same process) crash most of the time when I try to bring up the process. Some threads wait for shared memory between the threads to get created (I can see that all of it does not get created).
But when I use strace , the process does not hang and it works just fine (all of the memory that is supposed to be created, gets created). Even interrupting strace after the memory gets created, keeps the process running fine for good.
I have read this:
strace fixes hung process
which did give me an idea. But I am still unclear on this as the version of RHEL that they have used is not mentioned.
Also, another point is that, changing the kernel to a fedora (compatible) kernel did not produce the issue.
So, I would just like to know how exactly does strace affect a process ? (or is it just the stack that moves back to the kernel as pointed out in the link) ?
Which signal does gdb send when attaching to a process? Does this work the same for different UNIXes. E.g. Linux and Mac OS X?
So far I only found out, that SIGTRAP is used to implement breakpoints. Is it used for attaching aswell?
AFAIK it does not need any signals to attach. It just suspends the "inferior" by calling ptrace. It also reads debugged process memory and registers using this calls and it can request instruction single stepping (provided it's implemented on that port of linux), etc.
Software breakpoints are implemented by placing at right location instruction that triggers "trap" or something similar when reached, but debugged process can run full speed until then.
Also (next to reading man ptrace, as already mentioned) see ptrace explanation on wikipedia.
Just getting into Meteor, which by many accounts seems like a great project. One potential issue (which it may not be) is there doesn't seem to be a meteor stop or another programmatic way to shut down meteor gracefully. Please let me know if I am wrong about this!
Are there potential concerns about maintaining database integrity (for example), if we interrupt the process using CTRL-C or shutting it down via an Activity Monitor? And are there steps we can take to reduce or eliminate such issues?
Caveat: I recognize the above questions are somewhat vague, and I understand that this is usually considered harmful on Stack, but I hope they are still answerable ones.
Thanks,
It does look like there is a cleanup which takes place before the process is terminated (https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/tools/cleanup.js).
The first signal sent is SIGINT which is a polite way to ask the process to shut down (and give it time to finish its last running thread)
With database integrity, the mongod process also tries to clean itself up before it shuts down & it has a recovery mechanism (from the journal files) on a quick recovery while restarting if forced to shutdown.
That being said, in the middle of a longer running thread I'm not too sure if it's allowed to finish or its killed immediately. But meteor does attempt to give it a chance to have a graceful termination at first, and then escalates it to a SIGHUP then finally a SIGTERM (which is still a graceful termination signal). At no point does meteor force or send a SIGKILL or SIGSTOP.
So meteor apps should be safe from Ctrl+C termination. With activity monitor termination it depends on what type of signal its sent (i.e Force Quit or just Quit)
So to add some closure to this, if your mongodb is externally managed, i.e. on a deployment production server meteor doesn't stop it as mongo-runner.js notes:
// Since it is externally managed, asking it to actually stop would be
// impolite, so our stoppable handle is a noop
if (process.env.MONGO_URL) {
launch_callback();
return handle;
}
I found a bunch of scripts in the project I have been newly assigned to that are the "shutdown" scripts. They just do some basic searches and run the Unix kill command. Is there any reason they shouldn't shutdown the process this way? Does this ensure that dynamically allocated memory will return properly? Are there any other negative effects? I've operated under an intuition that this is a last resort way of terminating a process.
The kill command sends a signal to a Unix process. That signal defaults to SIGTERM, which is a polite request for the program to exit.
When a process exits for any reason, the Unix OS does clean up its memory allocations, file handles and other resources. The only resources that do not get cleaned up are those that are supposed to be shared, like the contents of files and of shared memory (like System V IPC).
Many programs do not need to do any special cleanup on exit and use the default SIGTERM behavior, which is to let the OS stop the process.
If a program does need special behavior, it can install a signal handler, and it can then run a function to handle the signal.
Now the SIGKILL signal, which is number 9, is evil, but also necessary. This signal never gets to the process itself, the OS simple stops the process. This should only be used when really, really necessary. It often becomes necessary in multithreaded programs that get into deadlocks or programs that have installed a TERM signal handler, but screwed up during their exit process.
kill is a polite request for the program to end. It cleans up its memory, closes its handles and other such niceities. It sends a SIGTERM
kill -9 tells the operating system to grab the process by the balls and throw it the hell out of the bar. Obivously it is not concerned with niceities - although it does reclaim all the memory, as it's the Operating System's responsability to keep track of that. But because it's a forceful shutdown you may have problems when trying to run the program again (not cleaning up .pid files for example)
See also [wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_(Unix)
Each process runs in its own protected address space, and when the process ends (whether it exits voluntarily or is killed by an external signal) that address space is fully reclaimed. So yes, all if its memory is released properly.
Depending on the process, it may or may not cause other problems next time you try to run it. For example, it may have some files open and leave them in an inconsistent state if it's killed unexpectedly. (The files will be closed automatically, but it could be in the middle of writing some application data, for example, and the files may contain incomplete/inconsistent data if interrupted.)
Typically when the system is shutting down, all processes will be sent signal 15 (SIGTERM), at which they can perform whatever cleanup/shutdown actions they need to do. Then a short time later, they'll get signal 9 (SIGKILL), which immediately kills them, without giving them any chance to react in any way. This gives all processes a chance to clean up for themselves, and then forcefully kills any processes that aren't responding promptly.
kill -9
is the last resort, not kill.
Yes memory is reclaimed (this is the OS's responsibility)
The programs can respond to the signal however they want, it's up to the particular program to do "the right thing"
kill by default will send a terminate signal which will allow the process to exit gracefully. If the process does not seem to exit in a timely fashion, some scripts will then fall back on kill -9 which forces an exit, 'ready or not'.
In all cases OS managed things such as dynamic memory will be returned, files closed etc. But application level things may not be tidied up on a -9 kill.
kill merely sends a signal to the process. The process can trap signals (except for signal 9) and run code to perform shutdown. An app's shutdown is supposed to be brief, but it may not be instantaneous.
In any case, once the process exits, the operating system will reclaim dynamically allocated memory, close open file descriptors, and other resources.
There could be some resources that survive, for example if the app held shared memory or sockets that are also held by other (still living) processes.