[Melbourne-pm] An intermittent problem with open for append
David Dick
ddick at aapt.net.au
Wed May 28 03:03:50 PDT 2008
Mathew Robertson wrote:
> I suspect this is root of the problem, irrespective of NFS -> the
> webserver is using two instances of the script, to execute the request.
>
> If two processes open the same file for append, they will both
> succeed. Both processes will move their file pointer to the "end of
> the file" - which both happens to be at the same byte offset. One
> starts "print"ing... then the other "print"s -> the second write will
> clobber the first write.
no. actually, NFS is the important factor for appending Over nfs (at
least for older versions), O_APPEND is unreliable. On a local (modern)
unix filesystem it is a guarantee. concept is explained by W.R. Stevens
in Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment viewable at
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=99706&seqNum=11
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