Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.13

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September 15, 2021


We are happy to announce the release of ARC 6.13.0.

You can read about the most important change related to A-REX's Web Service interface below. In addition, as usual, this release comes with a few other improvements and bugfixes.

Highlights in this release

The most important change in this release is the extraction of a separate arc-arex-ws service previously integrated into the arc-arex service.

If you have not configured ARC with the [arex/ws] block you can ignore the instructions below as the problem does not affect you.

The split up of the two services addresses a memory usage issue occurring when a large number of input files are handled, see Bug #4020 for details.

Therefore, if (and only if) you have enabled A-REX's web service interface through the [arex/ws] configuration block, you now need to start it as a separate service arc-arex-ws.

You can easily do this by issuing the command

arcctl service start -a
arcctl service enable -a

This will start and enable all services as configured (-a) in arc.conf.

Note further that the startup scripts for arc-arex and arc-arex-ws now set MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2. This prevents memory fragmentation which has been seen to seriously degrade the system. See details in Bug #4020.

For further improvements, should your system suffer from the symptoms described in the bug, you could edit the arc-arex-start and arc-arex-ws-start scripts to use tcmalloc instead of glibc malloc by adding:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libtcmalloc.so.4

The following Bugzilla tickets have been adressed or solved

Documentation

The ARC 6 documentation can be found at this location.

If you miss something or have questions, please contact us!

Installing ARC 6

We recommend to install ARC release using the Nordugrid repository.

Note that if you instead install from EPEL for RHEL7 compatible systems, the ARC 6 packages can be found as nordugrid-arc6-* and not nordugrid-arc-*. This was needed in order to supply both ARC 5 already available for RHEL7 and the new ARC 6.

We provide binary builds for all supported versions of:

In addition we build nightly packages for older platforms.

Contributing

You can submit pull requests to our public repo which mirrors our GitLab repo.

The pull requests will be automatically copied over to our Gitlab repo where they will be merged into the source-code if accepted.

Getting in touch

If you need help with the configuration file or have any other questions related to ARC 6, please contact us via

Support of ARC 5-series

ARC 5 is no longer supported.

To install ARC 6 from EPEL7 the package-names are of type: nordugrid-arc6-*

Known issues

Previous releases

Details of previous releases can be found at the ARC Releases page

NorduGrid homepage