To keep everyone up to date (Andrew already knows this): I was wrong, everyone else was right. The flat backend has a bug in it that if a given seen file frequently reuses the same inode (as will happen frequently on lightly loaded systems) you run into this strange behavior with seen state between sessions.
I believe I've fixed this bug in CVS (did it a few days ago, actually) and it'll be in the next release. My apologies for my disbelief, Larry Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 10:08:52 -0500 From: Lawrence Greenfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --On Friday, November 15, 2002 8:49 PM +1100 Andrew McNamara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I suspect there is a bug in the flat-file seen implementation. Each > process opens the seen file and holds this file descriptor open. Then one > process wants to update the file. It does this by writing a new file, > and renaming it into place. But all the other processes still have the > now unlinked and out of date copy open. I'm still very dubious about this explanation. If you examine cyrusdb_flat, you'll see that "fetch()" calls "starttxn_or_refetch()", which either locks the file and makes sure we have the latest version or (if it's in a non-transactional read) makes sure it's reasonably up to date. Larry
