crash recovery may be improved
Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 7:22 am
part 1: rant, but may be useful to some deluge users
0.5.8.8 crashed overnight and continued crashing when restarted. I checked web site, found that 0.5.8.9 is out (and yes - crashes when adding new torrents - I had a couple of those...), installed it - nothing's changed, still crashes. Ok, FAQ says: delete persistent.state - done it, re-added my seeded torrents - and deluge started re-downloading them, apparently because I moved most of the files from the default download folder to their proper locations and these locations were stored in persistent.state. So I am supposed to re-assign paths manually to all of my 50+ seeded torrents? Fat chance (BTW how can I specify a path at torrent open?), I'd rather restore last good persistent.state from a backup - and the most disturbing thing happened, deluge continued re-downloading torrents this time overwriting files already moved to their proper folders! That actually was my fault - I should've deleted .fastresume files which were created when I added torrents the first time, but this is not in the FAQ and took a couple of rather stressed minutes to figure out. After that I started deluge, run a forced check and found out that all is fine.
part 2: lessons - hope deluge team does something about it
Storing file locations in persistent.state is not a good idea and may make recovery from the crash damn difficult especially for heavy seeders. There should be a more reliable separate storage, preferably a plain text file with (<torrent file> <folder>) records.
It is also worth mentioning in the FAQ that .fastresume files should be deleted when recovering from a crash. Apparently the worst thing that can happen with bad .fastresume files is that some pieces will be downloaded the second time but better be safe than sorry.
0.5.8.8 crashed overnight and continued crashing when restarted. I checked web site, found that 0.5.8.9 is out (and yes - crashes when adding new torrents - I had a couple of those...), installed it - nothing's changed, still crashes. Ok, FAQ says: delete persistent.state - done it, re-added my seeded torrents - and deluge started re-downloading them, apparently because I moved most of the files from the default download folder to their proper locations and these locations were stored in persistent.state. So I am supposed to re-assign paths manually to all of my 50+ seeded torrents? Fat chance (BTW how can I specify a path at torrent open?), I'd rather restore last good persistent.state from a backup - and the most disturbing thing happened, deluge continued re-downloading torrents this time overwriting files already moved to their proper folders! That actually was my fault - I should've deleted .fastresume files which were created when I added torrents the first time, but this is not in the FAQ and took a couple of rather stressed minutes to figure out. After that I started deluge, run a forced check and found out that all is fine.
part 2: lessons - hope deluge team does something about it
Storing file locations in persistent.state is not a good idea and may make recovery from the crash damn difficult especially for heavy seeders. There should be a more reliable separate storage, preferably a plain text file with (<torrent file> <folder>) records.
It is also worth mentioning in the FAQ that .fastresume files should be deleted when recovering from a crash. Apparently the worst thing that can happen with bad .fastresume files is that some pieces will be downloaded the second time but better be safe than sorry.