Gluster users - Feb 2016 - Sparse files and heal full bug fix backport to 3.6.x

There is a thread from 2014 mentioning that the heal process on a
replica volume was de-sparsing sparse files.(1)

I've been experiencing the same issue on Gluster 3.6.x. I see there is
a bug closed for a fix on Gluster 3.7 (2) and I'm wondering if this
fix can be back-ported to Gluster 3.6.x?

My experience has been:
Replica 3 volume
1 brick went offline
Brought brick back online
Heal full on volume
My 500G vm-storage volume went from ~280G used to >400G used.

I've experienced this a couple times previously, and used fallocate to
re-sparse files but this is cumbersome at best, and lack of proper
heal support on sparse files could be disastrous if I didn't have
enough free space and ended up crashing my VM's when my storage domain
ran out of space.

Seeing as 3.6 is still a supported release, and 3.7 feels too bleeding
edge for production systems, I think it makes sense to back-port this
fix if possible.

Thanks,
Steve



1. https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2014-November/019512.html
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1166020

Adding Pranith, maintainer of the replicate feature.


Regards,
Raghavendra


On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Steve Dainard <sdainard at spd1.com>
wrote:
> There is a thread from 2014 mentioning that the heal process on a
> replica volume was de-sparsing sparse files.(1)
>
> I've been experiencing the same issue on Gluster 3.6.x. I see there is
> a bug closed for a fix on Gluster 3.7 (2) and I'm wondering if this
> fix can be back-ported to Gluster 3.6.x?
>
> My experience has been:
> Replica 3 volume
> 1 brick went offline
> Brought brick back online
> Heal full on volume
> My 500G vm-storage volume went from ~280G used to >400G used.
>
> I've experienced this a couple times previously, and used fallocate to
> re-sparse files but this is cumbersome at best, and lack of proper
> heal support on sparse files could be disastrous if I didn't have
> enough free space and ended up crashing my VM's when my storage domain
> ran out of space.
>
> Seeing as 3.6 is still a supported release, and 3.7 feels too bleeding
> edge for production systems, I think it makes sense to back-port this
> fix if possible.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>
>
>
> 1.
> https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2014-November/019512.html
> 2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1166020
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> http://www.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
>
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