Re: Git pushes and pulls from savannah often hang

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Paul,

Paul Eggert wrote:
> I'm getting a lot of hangs when I push or pull commits from
> savannah.gnu.org. Although this has happened in the past, the frequency has
> increased quite a bit recently.

Hmm...  It's a newer version of git, sshd, and the rest of the OS.
Which would include kernel, networking, and everything else associated
with it.  Otherwise the configuration of all should be the same as the
previous system.  Everything has been updated to the current release
in Trisquel 9 Stable LTS version.

However if it used to happen previously too then that would indicate
that it is not the server VM which is an issue.  Since that was
updated on December 24th, 2021.

> For example, for Coreutils a few minutes ago:
> 
> $ git push
> Enumerating objects: 5, done.
> Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
> Delta compression using up to 4 threads
> Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
> Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 466 bytes | 466.00 KiB/s, done.
> Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0

I think the commit is done when we see "Writing objects: 100%" in the
above.  And then after that it prints information.  In the above I see
the Total line but it has not emitted the verbose printing of what
commit hashes were before and after.

> and the shell command hangs indefinitely. Eventually I give up, and maybe
> type ^C and try again, and it'll work. Sometimes I need to try two or more
> times. For the command above, the push actually worked (the commit landed on
> Savannah) even though the 'git push' command was hanging indefinitely.

I don't know why that might be happening.  And the system has not
seemed to be overloaded.

> I'm seeing this at both home and work, so it's not my local network (though
> it could be a Los Angeles thing).

> For this repository, 'git config -l' reports:

All of that looks normal to me.  Certain things are client local of
course.  But as far as anything that would interact with the server
side of git I didn't notice anything.

As a committer you are using ssh to the system.  One of the possible
sources of issue might be the ssh interaction to the sshd.  The above
looks like it was done but just not closing and exiting.  In which
case I suggest examining your ssh config and seeing if anything there
might stand out.  I know you said this has been happening from
multiple locations.  But I also know configuration might be shared.

For example ControlMaster et al configuration with a forgotten port
forwarding or something.  That should be disabled on the server side
so I don't think that is it here.  But as an for example of something
client side that might be causing trouble.

I don't know if turning on ssh verbose would cause problems with git
or not.  But that might be an interesting experiment to try.  Then see
if there is a difference between a working case and a hanging case.
It will be interesting if other's on the users list are also seeing
this problem too.

Thank you for reporting the issue.  I am sorry I don't have a better
debug recipe.

Bob