daml/ci/clear-shared-segments-macos.yml
Gary Verhaegen 8539873d84
document shared memory segment issue (#6546)
document shared memory segment issue

After discussion with @SamirTalwar-DA, we agree the CI script to clear
memory segments is a bit too dangerous to make it easy to run on
developer machines. Still, developers may run into similar issues if
they run lots of tests and/or do not reboot their laptop frequently.
On developer laptops, we  usually spawn one PostgreSQL instance per
build/test that needs it (as opposed to CI where we create a single one
for the entire build; see `build.sh`), so they can actually build up
fairly quickly in some scenarios.

As an alternative, I have added a section to the README to cover what to
do if that issue happens.

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2020-06-30 17:48:14 +02:00

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# Copyright (c) 2020 Digital Asset (Switzerland) GmbH and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
# We have a number of tests that require spawning and then destroying an
# instance of a PostgreSQL server. PostgreSQL uses a shared memory segment to
# coordinate between internal threads. On macOS (and maybe other platforms, but
# macOS is the one where we observed the issue), about one in three times Bazel
# stops a PostgreSQL server, the shared memory segment does not get reclaimed.
# Over time, the shared memory gets full and the machine is not able to start
# new instances of PostgreSQL until it gets rebooted. Given that we do not have
# an easy way to reboot macOS nodes, this is a Bad Thing™.
#
# This simple script will mark all of the existing shared memory segments on
# the machine for deletion. This has not been extensively tested and may cause
# issues. It seems safe enough for now because:
#
# 1. We currently do not run any other application than PostgreSQL that uses
# shared memory segments on CI, and
#
# 2. The command, despite the `rm` in its name, does not actually delete the
# memory segments, but simply marks them for reclamation. They will be kept for
# as long as there is at least one process connected to them. Since PostgreSQL,
# at least in the configuration we are using, runs from a single process, this
# is safe to run even while PostgreSQL is still running (Works On My Machine®).
# Segments do get deleted immediately if there is no process connected to them
# when the command is run.
steps:
- bash: |
set -euo pipefail
# ipcs -m prints a three-line human-friendly header then all memory
# segments in a tabular format. The second column holds the segment IDs,
# which is what ipcrm expects as its arguments. After the table, ipcs -m
# adds an extra blank line, hence the extra sed at the end.
for shmid in $(ipcs -m | sed 1,3d | awk '{print $2}' | sed '$d'); do
ipcrm -m $shmid
done
name: clear_shm