Looks like there's an issue balancing the pool

MikeWI

Build 5824:  << originally had transposed the numbers. 

I added a new 2TB drive to my pool which was stable at 100%  No problems adding the drive, but as expected, it wanted me to re-balance the pool, so I clicked on rebalance. When it completed, the state of the pool went from 92% to 95%.  I told it to remeasure and the 512gb that had been reported as unusable for duplication was down to 178gb.  The balance was still off, so I ran it again.  Now we're at 168gb unusable for duplication and the pool is at 96%.

I took a look at the console during the next re-balance which is running now, and I briefly saw some messages saying the word "fail".  The only trouble is that I couldn't scroll up to see those messages, because the display was constantly adding new lines.  

So some questions:

Clicking auto scroll on or off made no difference.  I can't see any place where I can determine the location of a on disk log file.  Is there one?  There's no way for me to find out what the messages were.

Changing the Trace Detail to "warnings" or "errors" does not filter the displayed list like I expected, but seemed to affect new entries at the bottom.  Meanwhile it also seemed to remove items from the output.  I say this because when the re-balance finished, I copied the console into Notepad so I could search for those messages, and none were there.

Any idea what I should be looking for to determine why it's not able to balance?  It's been doing fine for about a month.  Only now that I added a fresh drive am I having issues.

The last re-balance finished and now I'm at 97.1%.

Settings are:

• Integrate user interface into the default tab
• Duplicate files in real time
• read striping for duplicated files
• enable tracing

Edit:

I managed to snag some errors.  They are all basicly the same thing with different files as in:

DrivePool.Service.exe Warning: 0 : [FileBalance] Error moving '\\?\Volume{e1feebc8-436a-11e1-bb0a-806e6f6e6963}\PoolPart.f30b869c-ca5c-455a-8ce1-be9f335e85b9\ServerFolders\Documents\LaurisJunk\FinalOffload\Pictures\Mauser\IMG_0368.JPG' to '\\?\Volume{d3c6be94-6572-11e1-8dc6-002522fa8e12}\PoolPart.62ecac83-8895-49fa-a0b4-5c7b22fd60e0\ServerFolders\Documents\LaurisJunk\FinalOffload\Pictures\Mauser\IMG_0368.JPG'. Cannot create a file when that file already exists

DrivePool.Service.exe Warning: 0 : [FileBalance] Error moving '\\?\Volume{e1feebc8-436a-11e1-bb0a-806e6f6e6963}\PoolPart.f30b869c-ca5c-455a-8ce1-be9f335e85b9\ServerFolders\Documents\LaurisJunk\Win7OffloadFiles\My Webs\rawdogranch\20040626fundraiser\002\images\0036129-R1-002-00A.jpg' to '\\?\Volume{d3c6be94-6572-11e1-8dc6-002522fa8e12}\PoolPart.62ecac83-8895-49fa-a0b4-5c7b22fd60e0\ServerFolders\Documents\LaurisJunk\Win7OffloadFiles\My Webs\rawdogranch\20040626fundraiser\002\images\0036129-R1-002-00A.jpg'. Cannot create a file when that file already exists

Any ideas?  This has been working flawlessly up to now, and I'm really happy with it.

Paaland

DP cannot balance (i.e. move) files that it cannot get an exclusive lock on. I other words it cannot balance files which are open in some application. That can be a media device scanning files (movies , images etc) an application on a client PC or even antivirus sometimes causes issues.

I've found that rebooting the server will break any locks any applications had. Unless they immediately relock a file you can try to kick off a rebalancing just after a reboot.

DP should eventually be able to rebalance on one of it's timed passes that get's scheduled since you are not 100% balanced. Over time as applications releases their locks on files DP should balance better and better until finally reaching 100%

MikeWI

Thanks for the help.  There is nothing accessing the server, and the only thing I could think of that might still get in the way is Disk Keeper.  I disabled that on all of the pooled drives, and re-booted the server, but it's still having trouble.  I'm getting there slowly, in smaller and smaller increments, but it is doing it I guess.  I've lost count of how many times I've done it so far, but I guess I'll just keep going.  There are two smaller drives in the pool that were low on free space so there's a lot for it to move to the new drive to even that out.  Maybe that's why I've never seen this happen before.

Shane

Perhaps http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Log_Collection and submit an IO log of the not-so-balancing issue on your machine to Alex?

MikeWI

that's the kind of thing I was looking for!  Unfortunately, the pool is now static at 99.2% and won't let me do any more balancing.  I'll leave the server up for a couple days (no standby) to give it a chance to do something on it's own.  Addendum.  Tracing is enabled by default, and it still is, but there is no service folder, and of course, no log file.  Installation problem?

Shane

There should definitely be a C:\ProgramData\StableBitDrivePool\Service folder on the server. If not, er, yes, installation problem!

MikeWI

I installed the latest beta, and nothing changed.  Guess the only thing I can do is remove drivepool, and try to re-install it.  And it was working so well too.  

Shane

On the plus side, it should automatically detect all your existing pool folders when you re-install.

MikeWI

Ok, I know I'm stupid but wow.  I'm reading "programdata" and thinking "programfiles".  I found the service folder right where it's supposed to be with everything else.  I'll submit it.