two bugs with 11.5.2 and two workarounds

[minidomo]

I’ve recently replaced a pretty old Mac mini that was has been acting as a “file server” (just using OS X 10.6 file sharing to service a 4-person office). The new station is also a Mac mini (Late 2014, 16G RAM, OS X 10.10.1) running Retrospect Single Server 11.5.2 (104). I am not running OS X Server — at least, not yet. Still just using the integrated file sharing.

 

Although I am using Retrospect 11.5.2 on several other Macs at another office, all of those are running OS X 10.9.5. This is the only station where I’ve got Retrospect running under OS X 10.10. And I’m running into a situation where Retrospect stops responding under two specific situations:

 

* I have 3 rotating external hard drives where backups are stored. These are all disk-based media sets, one recycled set for each day of the week. Although I am still using the same physical drives, I used to backup into seven individual file-based media sets, but have opted for the disk-based sets instead because I can limit them to only using no more than 10% of the backup drive. So I would create the first set (Week1-1) and that would work fine. But when I would attempt to create Week1-2, the “add” window would just barely start to roll up after clicking “add”, and then Retrospect would appear to hang. I examined the Console log and found this error repeated over and over again:

 

12/17/14 1:43:30.223 AM WindowServer[148]: WSGetSurfaceInWindow : Invalid surface 573498759 for window 169

 

Strangely enough, I made a guess that it was something about redrawing the window, so I switched Retrospect to running in full screen mode and this circumvented the problem. Very weird, but it worked.

 

* The other problem I had involved enabling media sets within a backup script. I have the first week’s script done, so it has 7 media sets (Week1-1, Week1-2, etc.) and 7 schedules (one recycle script per night with a 3-week repeat). Now I clone that script to make the Week2 script. First thing I do is go into the Media Sets tab and want to click to enable all the Week2-x sets before I go to the Schedules tab to use them as new targets. I can click the first one but clicking the second set causes Retrospect to hang, and I have to force-quit the app. Looking at the Console log, I see messages such as these:

 

12/17/14 12:06:56.000 PM kernel[0]: process RetroEngine[26] thread 339831 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 78%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 90.122123 seconds, (78.577832 user, 11.544291 system) ledger info: balance: 90005809303 credit: 90005809303 debit: 0 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 114159505629 

 

12/17/14 2:06:56.590 AM spindump[427]: Saved wakeups_resource.diag report for RetroISA version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/RetroISA_2014-12-17-020656_PJJ2.wakeups_resource.diag

 

12/17/14 2:06:55.000 AM kernel[0]: process RetroISA[53] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 177; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45032

 

I did develop a workaround, which was this:

 

1. Enable 1 additional script — for sake of example, we’ll start with Week2-7.

2. Switch to the schedule tab and adjust the event that used Week1-7 to use Week2-7, then set the schedule for the proper date and time.

3. Commit the changes to the script.

4. Quit Retrospect.

5. Launch Retrospect.

6. Select script for Week2 and disable media set Week1-7 (since it is no longer being used by any schedule in this script).

7. Return to step 1 but enable media set Week2-6 this time, and repeat forward for all remaining events.

 

So both of those workarounds did fix my problems, but obviously there’s some underlying issue(s) here.