[Koha-devel] The many failings of background_jobs_worker.pl

[Philippe Blouin]

Howdy!

Since moving a lot of our users to 22.05.06, we've installed the worker 
everywhere.  But the number of issues encountered is staggering.

The first one was

Can't call method "process" on an undefined value

where the id received from MQ was not found in the DB, and the process 
is going straight to process_job and failing.  Absolutely no idea how 
that occurs, seems completely counterintuitive (the ID comes from the DB 
after all), but here it is.  Hacked the code to add a "sleep 1" to fix 
most of that one.

Then came the fact that stored events were not checked if the connection 
to MQ was successful at startup.  Bug 30654 refers it. Hacked a little 
"$init" in there to clear that up at startup.

Then came the

malformed UTF-8 character in JSON string, at character offset 296 
(before "\x{e9}serv\x{e9} au ...")

at decode_json that crashes the whole process.  And for some reason, it 
never gets over it, gets the same problem at every restart, like the 
event is never "eaten" from the queue.  Hacked an eval then a try-catch 
over it...

After coding a monitor to alert when a background_jobs has been "new" 
over 5 minutes in the DB, I was inundated by messages. There's alway one 
elasticsearch_update that escapes among the flurry, and they slowly add up.

At this point, the only viable solution is to run the workers but 
disable RabbitMQ everywhere.  Are we really the only ones experiencing that?

Regards,

PS Our servers are well-above-average Debian 11 machines with lot of 
firepower (ram, cpu, i/o...).

-- 
Philippe Blouin,
Directeur de la technologie

Tél.  : (833) 465-4276, poste 230
philippe.blouin at inLibro.com

inLibro | pour esprit libre | www.inLibro.com <http://www.inLibro.com>
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