Re: Weird lock problem

On 7/17/2023 12:35 PM, James H. H. Lampert via MIDRANGE-L wrote:

I had a program (ILE RPG) running in batch, over the weekend, on a customer box.

Very early Saturday morning, it apparently ran into a lock conflict of some sort, on a file whose F-spec opens it as "UF A E           K DISK," not USROPN, never closing it, with the program continuously active.

Anybody have any idea what could have ripped a lock away from a running program?

Without specifics, one is reduced to guessing, and yet...

Consider the situation where the program in question is continuously running. Reading, adding, and updating records. This sort of access does not require an exclusive lock on the file - *SHRUPD will do. Now, along comes say a weekly backup, which wants a *EXCL lock on that file. That would result in the backup throwing a 'Cannot allocate object' error.

Another possibility is that a weekly batch process started running that needs to update each record to say, tag it as processed for that week. Since that second program is going to read each record for update, it will require a lock on that record. At some point, luck might run out, and the two processes will want the same record.

The actual job log messages would help considerably.