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Failure when starting Aerospike with Index on Disk as non-root user
Problem Description
When starting Aerospike with Index on Disk (also known as ‘allflash’) the startup fails with the following error message:
Mar 12 21:52:42 astest01ea1.aws.sig asd[6422]: Mar 12 2019 21:52:42 GMT: WARNING (hardware): (hardware.c:247) error while opening file /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes for writing: 13 (Permission denied)
Mar 12 21:52:42 astest01ea1.aws.sig asd[6422]: Mar 12 2019 21:52:42 GMT: FAILED ASSERTION (hardware): (hardware.c:276) write failed unexpectedly
Explanation
Aerospike Index on Disk uses operating system page caching heavily and, as such, when starting, will optimize IO settings to ensure best performance. The error message above indicates that the user starting the Aerospike daemon does not have sufficient privileges to make these changes and the startup fails.
Solution
This has been fixed as of version 4.5.3.2. In previous versions, the only solution is to run as a root user.
Notes
When started from the command line using the root user, Aerospike will then switch to a non-root user to relinquish root privileges after startup. When running via systemd this is not possible as the systemd implements the new style daemon model.
Keywords
ALL FLASH INDEX ON DISK ROOT SYSTEMD DIRTY_BYTES
Timestamp
4/3/2019