Hi @nick_poole,

I picked your changes and merged into my version and pushed back into shelve #16575.

I think we need to preserve journal rotations. As a simple example : my edge server has 100GB of journal created each day while my commit only has 5GB a week. I want to rotate daily my edge journal so that weekly checkpoint doesn't take an hour and don't explode journal filesystem too.

I got my work working without any modification. As you said you need a privileged user but p4dctl already has all the tools it need to do so : by using P4TICKETS and P4USER in the environment section it totally fix the problem.
So now I have a replica able to checkpoint and rotate journal.
I did noticed that checkpoints weren't made on replicas until master would do a journal rotation.
I also did know that journal rotation on master would launch a rotation on replicas
It was less funny to discover that launching a replica journal rotation trigger in fact a master journal rotation. Which mean it's pointless to do a rotation of journal on replicas if something is already doing it on master. Also mean you can't rotate whenever you want a replica which IMO is a bad thing. A daily rotation on 2 sites with time difference could potentially make the rotation happen in the middle of the day.

So to do a checkpoint on a replica with an automatic task you have first to schedule the checkpoint on the replica and then launch a journal rotation on master, 2 steps need to be done in the right order.

With my current knowledge I think the whole checkpoint / rotation on replicas need a buff.

Regards,
-L

Feel free to look at this : https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/changes/16575
It's a first draft on adding a p4replica server type. I'm not extremely happy with how I made it, I didn't hade time yet to try it, at least it compile.
It should work fine unless I forgot to take care of specific cases.

I also added journal compression but not yet error handling on Journal = true & checkpoint = false. No clue yet how to handle it.

Hello,

P4D::checkpoint might be problematic. I do get the idea about doing it with a 'p4d -jc' but replicas don't like that and enforce usage of 'p4 admin checkpoint'. Which make both journal and checkpoint fail.
Thinking about a solution.
Current thought is leading me to a new server type in server.conf that would be be p4replica with a p4replica class son of p4d. Checkpoint and RotateJournal being overridden.

Hi Nick,

I wasn't aware of -Z for compressing the checkpoint only.
I didn't looked at journal rotation because I never do that (not yet in fact) so it was out of my mind.
But considering it, if you want to rotate journal and compress it, shouldn't case 4 (ckp=false, jnl=true) still work for journal rotations ? I agree it would be weird to checkpoint with journal uncompressed while rotate would compress it.

Other than this, I totally agree that we then need to go further and add journal compression too.
It's your code, it might be faster for you to work on it no ?
For me now that I know the toolchain and how is the code generated it should be quite faster

Thanks, I'm totally ok with it. I'm the one that asked for the feature in case #00206843
This change is "required" for users using p4dctl to create checkpoints in a distributed helix server (aka commit/edge) as by default they are compressed and break edge servers.

configparse.c is certainly not necessary for the CL as it's generated at compil time.