Garbage Collection & Large Amounts of Symlinks [Resolved]

[tnt533]

Hey Folks! I have been having this issue with subsonic freaking out, taching out my CPU and causing Java to use more than a gig of ram and I think I narrowed it down but wanted to see if anyone else has had similar mileage. I was getting errors that pointed to excessive garbage collection without the freeing of substantive amounts of memory.

I store all my music on an NTFS drive so it can be accessible to windows and Linux (Kubuntu 11.10 AMD64). I have been using symbolic links to the files in my ~/Music folder for easy integration into media players and what not under Linux. My library is almost 300gig in size so it was around 42,000+ symlinked files.

Subsonic would work after install just fine and continue to work for a day or more then it would just crap out and refuse to take connections either locally or remotely. I narrowed it down to a DB issue. Deleting the db and lucene folders and then the .index file would bring it back but it would soon go AWOL again. I increased the heap size as well to no avail. I decided to point it directly to the mounted NTFS drive instead of the symlinks and it seems to be working just fine now.

Does anyone else have a similar story? Subsonic is supposed to be able to handle symlinks.

[ytechie]

Is it possible that it got caught on a looping symlink? It sounds like it would work for a day or so because it would start to die after the next search indexing.

[tnt533]

Well all the files are in one location, my ntfs media drive, and all the symlinks are on a different drive, my linux drive in the ~/Media folder. There are no symlinks on the NTFS drive so I am not sure how it would loop.

After deleting the above mentioned folders and file, it would work but for an indeterminate amount of time. It wouldn't always make it to the next index and would sometimes work well after the next index. I think it has to have something to do with how Java was alocating the memory when it ran into a link to a file as apposed to the file itself. the only other thing I can think of is the fact that the symlinks are pointing to files on an NTFS drive instead of EXT3/4.

[tnt533]

UPDATE:

The problem persisted. It worked all day and when I got home from school and logged out for an unrelated reason and logged back in it went back into the same mode of tached CPU and eating memory like the cookie monster.

To try to narrow down the issue this time I only deleted the index file and left the db and lucene folders alone. After bringing the process back up it worked. I can access the server, play music and it's rebuilding the search index. It appears to have something to do with the search index and not the symlinks like I originally thought.

Any ideas? Is there a particular log that would be helpful to post?

[ytechie]

Do you have any files with weird characters?

[tnt533]

Not 100% sure. 99% not 100%. I have an incoming folder for which I put all incoming music files that haven't been scrubbed by me. I tag them, add album art and use EasyTag to rename them. It is not outside of the realm of possibilities. So is it anything extended ASCII?

It's not an easy thing to check for as I have over 42000 tracks.

I'll check and get back to you. Might be a while.

[ytechie]

I don't know if it makes any difference. I am trying to rule everything out.

Here is an easier way to check: Just disable that folder and see if lucene has any problems. Might save you a day or two

[tnt533]

I'll just do a ls | more and work that space bar like a pro. but not tonight. I'll go through them in the morning.

I really appreciate your time and help. Thank you.

[ytechie]

if only there was a reverse grep.
(I bet you there is)

[tnt533]

I've decided to take a different approach. I emptied my music folder and will be adding it back artist by artist until it craps out. So far with one artist containing 8 albums it runs like a top with no excessive CPU usage.

It might be days but ill post back with results. Thanks again.

[ytechie]

Wow. You are gutsy. I wish you much luck!

[tnt533]

Man! When you're good, you're good! I some how accidentally copied my entire ~/Music full of the symlinks into a folder in my archive located on my storage drive. They WERE LOOPING! ROFL!!! I have no idea how that happened. *cough* *cough*

I was adding everything back artist by artist and it was taking too long so I did blocks of three letters; a-c then d-f, etc. Reindexing as I went. Of course the folder with the issues was ZZTop! Had to be the very LAST folder in my archive. With that set it exhibited the bad behavior and sure enough, the darn folder was full of symlinks.

Thank you for your help. I feel really stupid now.

Not sure how to mark this as resolved...

[ytechie]

Absolutely glad that I helped you out! It is fantastic that your issue is now resolved, and I hope you enjoy Subsonic as much as I do!