[Ocfs2-users] different timestamps for same file???

[Sunil Mushran]

OCFS2 skips updating the mtime for non-extending odirect writes.
Meaning, odirect writes that do not change the filesize. That just
happens to be how Oracle works... other than the time it is
(auto-)extending the datafile. We do this to allow multiple nodes
to write to the same file concurrently - better performance.

You are seeing different timestamps because we change the mtime
in the cached inode but do not flush that change to the disk.

If you want to see the mtime on disk, do:

$ debugfs.ocfs2 -R "stat <inodenum>" /dev/sdX

ls -i will show the inode number of the said file. Enclose in <>
as shown.

Qs is: Why is this causing a havoc? It shouldn't.

Alison Sanchez wrote:
>
> I am running ocfs2-2.6.9-42ELsmp-1.2.5-1 on Redhat 2.6.9-42ELsmp.
>
> The files are mounted on /u02 on 2 servers, however when I look at the 
> files, the timestamps are way off. I checked the current dates on both 
> of the servers and the dates are consistent with each other.
>
> For example, one file has a timestamp of Aug 12, 2007 from one server 
> and the same exact file when viewing from the other server has a 
> timestamp of March 3. The sizes are exactly the same and everything 
> else looks the same, it’s just the timestamp that is causing havoc 
> with our RAC database.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alison
>