JRS Systems: the blog

ctimes have got to be one of the most widely misunderstood features of POSIX filesystems. It’s very intuitive – and very wrong – to believe that just as mtime is the time the file was last modified and atime is the time the file was last accessed, ctime must be the time the file was created. Nope!

ctime is not the file creation time, it’s the inode creation time. Any time the inode for a file changes, the ctime changes. Which isn’t very intuitive, and happens much more frequent than you might think. In fact, I can’t think of a time that the mtime changes that the ctime won’t change with it… and in a lot of cases, the ctime will update when the mtime doesn’t! There’s a LOT of bad information floating around about this… so let’s examine it directly:

me@box:/tmp$ touch test
SHOWTIMES="%P \t ctime:  %Cb %Cd %CT \t mtime:  %Tb %Td %TT \t atime:  %Ab %Ad %AT \n" ;   export SHOWTIMES
me@box:/tmp$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name test -printf "$SHOWTIMES"
test ctime:  Jul 29 15:53:51.4814403150 mtime:  Jul 29 15:53:51.4814403150 atime:  Jul 29 15:53:51.4814403150
me@box:/tmp$ cat test > /dev/null
me@box:/tmp$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name test -printf "$SHOWTIMES"
test ctime:  Jul 29 15:53:51.4814403150 mtime:  Jul 29 15:53:51.4814403150 atime:  Jul 29 15:54:18.1014495830
me@box:/tmp$ touch test
me@box:/tmp$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name test -printf "$SHOWTIMES"
test ctime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920 mtime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920 atime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920
me@box:/tmp$ chmod 777 test
me@box:/tmp$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name test -printf "$SHOWTIMES"
test ctime:  Jul 29 15:54:32.7214485080 mtime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920 atime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920
me@box:/tmp$ mv test test2 ; mv test2 test
me@box:/tmp$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name test -printf "$SHOWTIMES"
test ctime:  Jul 29 15:54:54.6322825980 mtime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920 atime:  Jul 29 15:54:25.6522832920


OK, from top to bottom:

1. we create a file, and we check its ctime, mtime, and atime. No surprises.
2. we access the file, by cat’ing it to /dev/null. atime updates, ctime and mtime remain the same. No surprises.
3. we modify the file, by touching it. atime, mtime, and ctime update… not what you expected, amirite?
4. we change permissions on the file. ctime updates, but mtime and atime do not. Again… not what you expected, right right?
5. we mv the file a couple times. ctime updates again – mtime and atime still don’t.

This is usually the first answer that should be given to “how do I modify the ctime on a file?” (The second answer is: don’t. [i]By design[/b], there is no feature within a POSIX filesystem to set a ctime to anything other than the current system time, so the only way to do it is either to reset the system time, then mv the file, or to unmount the filesystem entirely and hexedit the metadata with a debugging tool. Neither is a good idea, and wanting to do so in the first place usually stems from a misunderstanding of what ctime is and does.)

I had a great time at SELF in Charlotte, NC this weekend. One of the highlights, for me, was for the first time meeting some fellow BSD types in the flesh – Kris Moore (founder of the PC-BSD distribution) and Dru Lavigne (Director of the FreeBSD Foundation), no less. While discussing the pain of doing FreeBSD installs onto RAIDZ, Kris told me about the new graphical installer in PC-BSD that lets you create new RAIDZ arrays of all types and install directly to them, all without ever having to leave the installer, which I found pretty exciting. I found it even more exciting when he told me that the procedures taken by the installer were based partly on my own work at freebsdwiki.net!

I set up a new VM with three virtual disks pretty much the minute I got home, and started a new PC-BSD 9.0 install. Sure enough, although the option is a little hard to discover, I managed to figure it out without having to go in search of any documentation – and without ever leaving the installer, and with a bare minimum of blood and chicken feathers, I got a brand new RAIDZ1 across my three virtual disks set up, and PC-BSD cheerfully installed onto it. (This is testing only, of course – in production, you should only do RAIDZ onto bare metal, not onto an abstraction like linux logical volumes or raw files accessed through a hypervisor.) Pretty heady stuff!

To the right – Tux dropped by the table while Dru and Kris and I were chatting, and posed for me with BSD’s horns.  How great is that?

in php.ini:

session.save_handler = memcache
session.save_path = "tcp://serv01:11211,tcp://serv02:11211,tcp://serv03:11211"


Obviously, you need php5-memcache installed, replace “serv1” “serv2” and “serv3” with valid server address(es), and you’ll need to restart your Apache server after making the change.

Why would you need to do this? Well, this week I had to deal with a web application server pool that kept slowly increasing its number of children all the way up to MaxCli, no matter what. It was unpredictable, other than being a slow creep. Eventually, stracing the pids showed that they were getting stuck in FLOCK on files in /var/lib/php5/php_sess*. This turns out to be an endemic problem with PHP that the devs don’t seem inclined to fix: php’s garbage collector will delete session files dirtily if a php process (which in the case of mod_php, means an Apache process) violates any of the php limits, such as max_execution_time (among many, many others). So you end up with your php script trying to lock a session file (file descriptor 3) that php’s garbage collector already deleted, and therefore an infinitely hung process that will never go away on its own.

Changing over to using memcache to store php sessions eliminated this file lock issue and resulted in a much more stable situation – a server pool that had been creeping up to 800 children per server over the course of a couple hours has been running stable and sweet on less than 150 children per server for days now.