[ZODB-Dev] Strange "File too large" problem

[Izak Burger]

Hi all,

I'm kind of breaking my normal rules of engagement here by immediately 
sending mail to a new list I just subscribed to, but then Andreas Jung 
did ask me to send a mail about this to the list.

This morning one of our clients suddenly got this error:

Traceback (innermost last):
   Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 121, in publish
   Module Zope2.App.startup, line 240, in commit
   Module transaction._manager, line 96, in commit
   Module transaction._transaction, line 380, in commit
   Module transaction._transaction, line 378, in commit
   Module transaction._transaction, line 436, in _commitResources
   Module ZODB.Connection, line 665, in tpc_vote
   Module ZODB.FileStorage.FileStorage, line 889, in tpc_vote
   Module ZODB.utils, line 96, in cp
IOError: [Errno 27] File too large

Zope was still alive, but when trying to restart it in debug mode it 
failed to come back to life, with a similar error to the above.

Our client initially thought it was a disk space issue, but of course 
that would have led to a "No space on device" error, so we quickly ruled 
this out. Then I thought perhaps they have their Data.fs on a crippled 
filesystem that is limited to 2GB or 4GB, but it they have it on ext3. 
For a second I thought perhaps python got compiled without large file 
support, but even that was not the case. The weirdest bit is that the 
Data.fs was already 17GB in size, a little over 2^34 bytes, nowhere near 
the traditional limits. I then packed the Data.fs down to 6GB and zope 
was happy again.

So in summary:

Zope 2.9.7
Plone 2.5.2
Data.fs on ext3, 17GB in size.
"IOError: File too large" for a 17GB Data.fs but happy with 6GB.

For the moment it is fine again, but this is really odd. Any ideas?

regards,
Izak Burger