I'm running the most recent stable version of Firefly on an XP SP2 machine. I moved up to this version because I recently switched AV software. The DB kept getting corrupted causing the service to fail, and I had read that sometimes AV and Firefly don't play nicely and the most recent stable version would be a little better at handling this.

Since upgrading Firefly things have worked mostly okay. Every two weeks or so the DB would get corrupted, and I would just delete the .db file and let the library rebuild. Not ideal, but it was tolerable. Starting a couple of days ago, the DB corruptions started happening more frequently - with an hour or two of rebuilding the DB.

More background information - I eventually switched back to the older AV product. They were both free from my ISP and the older one had fewer problems. I did go into its settings and make sure to exclude the Firefly directory.

Any idea what's going on?

baseggio wrote:

I'm running the most recent stable version of Firefly on an XP SP2 machine. I moved up to this version because I recently switched AV software. The DB kept getting corrupted causing the service to fail, and I had read that sometimes AV and Firefly don't play nicely and the most recent stable version would be a little better at handling this.

Since upgrading Firefly things have worked mostly okay. Every two weeks or so the DB would get corrupted, and I would just delete the .db file and let the library rebuild. Not ideal, but it was tolerable. Starting a couple of days ago, the DB corruptions started happening more frequently - with an hour or two of rebuilding the DB.

More background information - I eventually switched back to the older AV product. They were both free from my ISP and the older one had fewer problems. I did go into its settings and make sure to exclude the Firefly directory.

Any idea what's going on?

What made you suspect it was the db being corrupted? What was the error message? I'm wondering if its possible that it's something else.

As far as file locking because of av software, the 1.1b version stickied at the top of this forum would fix that.

-- Ron

This is the exact error I'm getting:

2008-01-22 23:26:40 (b7cf2c9f): Rescanning database
2008-01-22 23:29:31 (b7cf2c9f): Query: INSERT INTO updated VALUES (11251)
2008-01-22 23:29:31 (b7cf2c9f): Error: unable to open database file
2008-01-22 23:29:31: Aborting

I'm currently running svn-1586. That's a more recent version than the one stickied at the top of the forum, right?

Interestingly enough, I had to reboot my PC over the weekend and Firefly lasted longer before I got this error again. Now it's back to lasting a few days instead of a few hours.

baseggio wrote:

This is the exact error I'm getting:

2008-01-22 23:26:40 (b7cf2c9f): Rescanning database
2008-01-22 23:29:31 (b7cf2c9f): Query: INSERT INTO updated VALUES (11251)
2008-01-22 23:29:31 (b7cf2c9f): Error: unable to open database file
2008-01-22 23:29:31: Aborting

I'm currently running svn-1586. That's a more recent version than the one stickied at the top of the forum, right?

Interestingly enough, I had to reboot my PC over the weekend and Firefly lasted longer before I got this error again. Now it's back to lasting a few days instead of a few hours.

Yeah, that's it. The issue is that some other program is opening the database file for some reason. It might be a virus scanner, it might be a file system replication thing... anything like that. Whatever it is that's running and accessing that file in the background, the real fix is to stop it from doing that.

If it's a virus scanner, make sure that the songs3.db is excluded from the scanner. If it's a file replication or realtime backup program, exclude the file from that.

Something else is locking that file though. That's the underlying problem.

-- Ron

A co-worker told me about Filemon, which was really invaluable in diagnosing this. Basically you can have it watch some files and see what processes are accessing them. You can filter out processes (like Firefly) and look for the trouble makers.

Turns out, this was caused by Mozy, which is an online backup application. You had mentioned anti-virus and backup apps and I had excluded the db from them. However it looks like Mozy checks the archive bit for everything, regardless of whether the file is actually selected to be backed up.

Mozy's solution? Hide the file from Windows. This seems like it shouldn't work, but it hasn't broken Firefly and so far the db hasn't been corrupted. I'll report back when more time has passed.

I was skeptical about the hiding, and it didn't work.