sapling/eden/fs/monitor/README.md
Adam Simpkins 4f7fd33e29 add a new process to monitor EdenFS
Summary:
Add a simple new wrapper daemon to manage the edenfs daemon.  This is intended
to provide a few different features:

- Perform log rotation for EdenFS's output and the output of any of its
  spawned children processes.
- Help schedule restarts of EdenFS when the system looks idle.
- Provide a single process for the system to manage across graceful EdenFS
  restarts, to make management slightly simpler.

This initial commit does not perform graceful restarts yet, but has the basic
daemon management and log rotation present.

Reviewed By: wez

Differential Revision: D19588700

fbshipit-source-id: bba41c9f7efeb4417753c1d48dd72cf6d191f0c3
2020-01-31 13:22:26 -08:00

2.0 KiB

This directory contains a wrapper process that monitors the EdenFS daemon. This wrapper process serves a few purposes:

Simplifies management of EdenFS across graceful restarts

This monitoring process provides a single parent process that can be monitored by systemd and other system management daemons, even across EdenFS graceful restarts. When a graceful restart is desired this wrapper daemon can spawn the new EdenFS instance, so that the new EdenFS instance is still part of the original service process hierarchy.

Note that using a wrapper for this purpose is not strictly required with systemd (it is possible to inform systemd that the main process ID has changed and it should monitor a new process moving forward). However, this wrapper provides us a bit more flexibility and control around the restart mechanism, and also makes it easier to monitor EdenFS with other service management frameworks on other platforms.

Log file management and rotation

This process reads all messages printed by EdenFS to stdout and stderr, and writes them to a log file, performing log rotation when appropriate.

Implementing log rotation properly is tricky otherwise, as there are many different sources that can end up writing data to EdenFS's stdout/stderr descriptors, including separate processes like the privhelper process and spawned Python subprocesses.

Intelligent Restarting of EdenFS when it is Idle

This wrapper process supports requests to trigger a restart at some point in the future when EdenFS appears to be idle.

While graceful restart should minimize user-visible disruption, it can still introduce a delay for I/O operations while the restart is in progress. Therefore it is still desirable to try and perform the restart while users are not actively accessing the file system, if possible.

This functionality is provided by the wrapper primarily because the wrapper provides a convenient location to centralize this management in case multiple restart attempts are requested before EdenFS becomes idle.