Control: tag -1 unreproducible moreinfo Hi!
On Sun, 2025-03-30 at 02:05:22 +0100, Justin Servis wrote: > Package: dpkg > Version: 1.21.22 > Severity: important > X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected] > On multiple Debian 12 (Bookworm) systems, the dpkg-db-backup.service > unit begins running at midnight and enters a rapid restart loop. This > causes systemd (PID 1) to consume excessive CPU (often 100%) until > systemd's start-limit-hit is triggered. I have no readily available bookworm system running systemd. But I cannot see this behavior on one of my systems running sid with systemd. The only difference I can see in the systemd timer between bookworm and sid is the addition of Persistent=true. And for the dpkg-db-backup script only a couple of commits that do not seem relevant. > The service logs show that it starts and deactivates "successfully", > but systemd appears to consider it a failure and restarts it repeatedly. > This creates rapid log entries, spawns processes, and can overwhelm > lightweight systems (e.g., virtual machines). Could you parse those log entries? > Steps to reproduce: > 1. Let a Debian 12 system idle until midnight with the default timer > enabled > 2. Observe CPU usage via `top` or `htop` (systemd will be at or near 100%) > 3. Check `journalctl -u dpkg-db-backup.service` for repeated start/fail > cycles > Workaround: > Disabling the timer and masking the service resolves the issue: > > 'sudo systemctl disable --now dpkg-db-backup.timer sudo systemctl mask > dpkg-db-backup.service' > > This behavior affects both virtual and physical Debian 12 machines that > have not been modified beyond using Docker and standard updates. Please > investigate whether the unit file needs an adjusted Restart= policy or > if the script exits too quickly to be considered successful. The only thing I can think of is that the script itself is failing for some reason. Do you see any error output in some of the log files? Perhaps add «set -x» to the dpkg-db-backup script to see what's going on? Are backups created at all under /var/backups/? Do you have any package performing any automatic package management actions at the same time at midnight? Thanks, Guillem
