Seafile Pro as non root user very slow startup (lots of chowns being run)

Seafile Server
1

I just started to use Seafile, running Seafile Pro 11.0.6. I have a library that’s now about ~400 GB, mostly photos. Whenever I restart Seafile (running in docker compose), it takes like 5 minutes to start.

I’ve debugged a bit and found out that it’s because I’m running the seafile container as NON_ROOT. Running as root, it starts in seconds.

I see some entries that change the ownership of all files in the shared directory.

chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/

This command looks like it’s run three times(!?) in the scripts folder:

./enterpoint.sh:31:    chown -R seafile:seafile /opt/seafile/ 
./enterpoint.sh:32:    chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/
./start.py:76:            call('chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/seafile/')
./cluster_start.py:48:            call('chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/seafile/')

Is it really necessary to run this, on every startup? Three times? Shouldn’t this be a setting being set once, and then you stick with it? (Trying to change from non-root to root does not seem to be supported.)

2

This has been fixed in update: chown share_seafile by an enviroment var by wacmkxiaoyi · Pull Request #387 · haiwen/seafile-docker · GitHub

3

This was not fixed, i’m trying to upgrade to 13 (docker ce) and the healthcheck timeout makes seafile fail to start for my non-root setup where i can see chown in top doing something.

4

It looks like the linked pull request makes an override environment variable. By default he
chown still happens, but you can disable it by setting NON_ROOT_CHOWN_FILES to false in the environment.

5

It seems like I am facing the same issue. I am running as NON_ROOT, all files already have the correct rights. Still for each start of the docker container it takes roughly half an hour to chown the files.

I am using Seafile CE 12, have not upgraded to 13 yet.

@tomservo I couldn´t find any reference to the setting NON_ROOT_CHOWN_FILES you mentioned.

6

I found that by following the link @daniel.pan posted to pull request #387. On that page there are some links to diffs showing what changes to the code are part of the pull request. One of them is this one: update: chown share_seafile by an enviroment var by wacmkxiaoyi · Pull Request #387 · haiwen/seafile-docker · GitHub

There you can see that call('chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/seafile/') has been replaced with:

            non_root_chown_files = os.getenv('NON_ROOT_CHOWN_FILES', default='') == 'true'
            if non_root_chown_files:
                call('chown -R seafile:seafile /shared/seafile/')

I’m not a python expert, but I believe that is saying that if the environment variable NON_ROOT_CHOWN_FILES exists, and is set to false, the chown will be skipped. Please tell me if I have read that incorrectly, since I plan to set that env variable on my own setup soon.

7

You are right, I missed that because I was just looking at the master branch.

The environment variable was removed again quite soon and the handling was changed if you have a look at the history. Seems like I cannot paste links yet.