Troubleshooting and tricks

Increasing the debug level

By default, the logging level of AiiDA is minimal to avoid filling logfiles. Only warnings and errors are logged (to the ~/.aiida/daemon/log/aiida_daemon.log file), while info and debug messages are discarded.

If you are experiencing a problem, you can change the default minimum logging level of AiiDA messages (and celery messages – celery is the library that we use to manage the daemon process) using, on the command line, the two following commands:

verdi devel setproperty logging.celery_loglevel DEBUG
verdi devel setproperty logging.aiida_loglevel DEBUG

After rebooting the daemon (verdi daemon restart), the number of messages logged will increase significantly and may help in understanding the source of the problem.

Note

In the command above, you can use a different level than DEBUG. The list of the levels and their order is the same of the standard python logging module.

Note

When the problem is solved, we suggest to bring back the default logging level, using the two commands:

verdi devel delproperty logging.celery_loglevel
verdi devel delproperty logging.aiida_loglevel

to avoid to fill the logfiles.

Tips to ease the life of the hard drive (for large databases)

Those tips are useful when your database is very large, i.e. several hundreds of thousands of nodes and workflows or more. With such large databases the hard drive may be constantly working and the computer slowed down a lot. Below are some solutions to take care of the most typical reasons.

Repository backup

The backup of the repository takes an extensively long time if it is done through a standard rsync or backup software, since it contains as many folders as the number of nodes plus the number of workflows (and each folder can contain many files!). A solution is to use instead the incremental backup described in the repository backup section.

mlocate cron job

Under typical Linux distributions, there is a cron job (called updatedb.mlocate) running every day to update a database of files and folders – this is to be used by the locate command. This might become problematic since the repository contains many folders and will be scanned everyday. The net effect is a hard drive almost constantly working.

To avoid this issue, edit as root the file /etc/updatedb.conf and put in PRUNEPATHS the name of the repository folder.