troubleshooting: diagnosing incorrect task status

[hjoliver]

Add to the new troubleshooting section once #638 is merged.

---

The Cylc UIs show the scheduler's current knowledge of task and job state. For active tasks, that involves interaction with the external world:

• a task enters the "submitted" state if the job runner successfully returns a job ID on job submission
• then it enters the "running" state if the submitted job returns a "started" status message
• and finally, it enters the "succeeded" or "failed" state if the running job returns a corresponding status message

(Note the above assumes TCP job status messaging; otherwise the scheduler periodically polls for job status).

Tasks may get "stuck" in an incorrect state if anything blocks this external job status information. For instance, you may see a task that stays in the "submitted" state even though it actually ran and completed.

Polling the task - by which the scheduler queries the job runner and checks the job.status file - will return the correct result, but you may still need to determine what went wrong.

Incorrect task status implies one of two things:

• the job status message was not sent by the job
  • this implies the job was hard-killed (SIGKILL) or the host went down
  • (a soft kill or job failure will cause a "failed" status message to be sent before exit)
• or the job ran and completed but was unable to send status messages back
  • this implies network issues blocked the send
  • or the job could not find the Cylc package on the job host, to send the message

You can determine what happened by examining the job logs:

• if the job finished (succeeded or failed) that will be recorded in the job.status log regardless of message send
• if message send failed, the job.err log will record errors (this will not stop the job from completing, however)
• if the job.status file does not record completion, and the job is no longer present in the job runner queue, then the job must have been hard-killed

[oliver-sanders]

Closed by https://github.com/cylc/cylc-doc/pull/638?

If not, push a commit onto upstream/troubleshotting.

[hjoliver]

I didn't think it was covered very well, but maybe I didn't look closely enough. I'll re-check and tweak it if necessary...

[oliver-sanders]

Here's the troubleshooting entry for job status not updating:

https://github.com/cylc/cylc-doc/pull/638/files#diff-3109576eee7d4e82c35cf79b3678f427036bd7be93134e9cea4cc866a63f8919R110-R164

[hjoliver]

OK cool, that's good enough. I'll close this.