[p4] Perforce Proxy and Checkpoint

[Stephen Vance]

Nellie --

This is normal. If you had local users hitting the server during that 
time, they would hang, too. The server locks all tables for 
checkpointing. There's no way to change that.

The two most common solutions are variations on a theme. One is to use a 
file server with the ability to take quick snapshots. Another is to copy 
your journals over to another location, through real-time tailing, 
frequent 'p4d -jj' invocation, or p4jrep. In both situations, you need 
to start another server against the replicated/frozen data and do your 
checkpoint and backup from there. It may require a secondary server 
license (ask support) and there are some tricks to advance the journal 
counter properly.

For NetApp filers, Richard Geiger has a script in his portion of the 
Guest Depot. I have an updated version of it in my area that 
parameterizes the mount hierarchy a little more. I used this to take a 
client's lockout time from 45 minutes to 20 seconds. There are other 
adaptations floating around for other filers and file systems, but this 
one has the locking order and considerations correct and is a known good 
starting point.

Steve

Nellie Chen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have a team that is using a Perforce proxy server to access our central Perforce server.  However, when we are performing a backup of the central Perforce server by doing checkpointing, the proxy server accessing the central server also hangs.  Is this the expected behavior?
>
> The proxy server users have reported that they can neither view the files that are already synced to the proxy server, nor can they use p4 via command-line when setting P4PORT to the proxy server (p4 simply hangs).
>
> Is there a way to allow the proxy server users to access our central Server (just read access to the databases) while the checkpoint is occurring?  If not, can you suggest a workaround?
>
> Thanks,
> Nellie
>
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>   

-- 
Stephen Vance
www.vance.com