THE PINMANAGER SERVICE
The purpose of the pinmanager service in dCache is ensuring the presence of a file replica on disk.
It can be used by explicitly (un)pinning files via the admin interface or the bulk service, but is also used by the resilience component to ensure having a certain number of replicas available. PinManager is also used for keeping a replica online after fetching (staging) it from a connected tertiary storage system (sometimes called HSM - hierarchical storage manager), if staging is allowed.
(Un-)Pinning Concept
A pin, also called sticky-ness, is a concept describing a file replica on a pool that cannot be deleted for a certain duration. The pin effectively suppresses automatic garbage collection for the lifetime of the pin.
Pins may have a finite or infinite lifetime. Pins also have an owner, which may be a dCache service (such as resilience) or client through a protocol such as srm. Only the owner is allowed to remove unexpired pins. Several pins (for different users) can exist for the same pnfsid, and a file is considered pinned as long as at least one unexpired pin exists.
Configuring
The PinManager service can be run in a shared domain. It may also be deployed in high availability (HA) mode (coordinated via ZooKeeper) by having several PinManager cells in a dCache instance, which then need to share the same database and configuration.
pinmanager.db.host=pinman-db-hostname
pinmanager.db.name=dcache
pinmanager.db.password=
pinmanager.db.user=dcache
Pins are managed in this central database as well as on the pools containing the replicas.
Pin expiration and pin unpinning are background tasks which are executed regularly. The property pinmanager.expiration-period controls how often to execute these tasks. The default value is 60 seconds.
The property pinmanager.limits.pin-duration allows to configure the maximum allowed lifetime of pins. The default value is -1, which corresponds to an infinite lifetime.