dCache SRM Client 3.0.3 Release Notes

Highlights

This release includes various improvements to srmfs and the other srmclient code:

• Don't retry if there is a bug or the JVM runs out of memory.
• Reduce memory usage; improve srmls ability to show directory content.

The SRM tools include the ability to retry an SRM operation if there are certain failure modes. This release fixes this retry mechanism so it doesn't attempt to retry in circumstances where that is very unlikely to succeed: if there is a bug in the client or if there is a fatal problem with the JVM, such as running out of memory.

This release changes the way in which the response from the SRM server is parsed. The previous approach used almost twice as much memory as is necessary. For many operations, this increased memory usage was not noticable, but for directory listings, it resulted in srmls running out of memory faster. Fixing this has enabled srmls to list larger directories without running out of memory. The upper limit on the memory has also been increased slightly, based on observed maximum response sizes.

Note: the srmls command will only show (at most) the listing as returned from a single SRM operation. For directories will a large number of entries, the complete listing may exceed what the server is willing to respond, and srmls will show only a partial listing. The srmfs tool does not suffer from this limitation, so those experiencing problems should use srmfs.