| Title | Too many conflict e-mails sent |
| Status | suspended |
| Priority | essential |
| Assigned user | Nick Barnes |
| Organization | Ravenbrook |
| Description | If the replicator detects a conflict, it resolves it (by overwriting the job with the issue) and sends an email. If there is some condition which prevents the replicator poll from completing successfully, then it repeats this whole procedure, including the email, on the next poll. This is confusing and irritating because multiple identical emails are sent for each issue [4, 8]. If there are many conflicts, this can result in hundreds [1,2,4,6,10] or even thousands of email messages. The only way to cut them off is to set smtp_server to None, which is not desirable [3,4,6,7,9,11,12]. If all polls fail for an extended period, new conflict reports are generated for jobs and issues which have not changed for several days [6] |
| Analysis | This is basically the same as job000444, and strongly related to job000443. This customer had deleted TeamTrack issues(job000076), so his polls were never completing, leading to exponential backoff which was mistaken for a stall (reported as job000482). When the P4DTI was restarted to get it out of the stall, it did a number of failed polls in quick succession (poll_period returned to 10 seconds) and this generated many hundreds of conflict emails. One possibility is not to send any email on a conflict unless the overwrite actually changes the job. That way subsequent conflicts for the same job won't generate mail. |
| How found | customer |
| Evidence | [1] <http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/16/17-23-04/0.txt> (question to info@ravenbrook.com)[2] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/23/17-37-59/0.txt> (question to p4dti-questions@ravenbrook.com)[3] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/25/14-21-26/0.txt> (reply to [2])[4] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/25/14-51-30/0.txt> (reply to [3])[5] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/25/15-22-15/0.txt> (reply to [4], requesting clarification)[6] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/26/15-14-29/0.txt> (clarification of [4])[7] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/26/15-49-43/0.txt> (problem with patch suggested in [5])[8] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/25/18-50-57/0.txt> [9] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/26/12-14-40/0.txt> (new patch)[10] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/26/14-57-55/0.txt> ("over 800 emails")[11] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/26/20-02-25/0.txt> (smtp_server set to None)[12] < http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2002/03/27/13-32-19/0.txt> |
| Observed in | 1.3.3 |
| Introduced in | 1.1.0 |
| Created by | Nick Barnes |
| Created on | 2002-03-27 15:31:05 |
| Last modified by | Nick Barnes |
| Last modified on | 2018-07-05 17:27:58 |
| History | 2002-03-27 NB Created. 2018-07-05 NB Suspended because the P4DTI is obsolete. |