Updated files desync and become unlinked

Good day all...

This may (very likely) be me just misunderstanding a "feature" of NFS... but I have a VERY odd behaviour pattern.

We update a set of perl modules on an NFS client (svn update to grab new files) we then ssh to another client and restart our apache server there and go along our merry way. We noticed that the apache server would fairly consistently have an old version of the file running and continue running with it until a new child started and reread the file (minutes later).

In debugging this we changed the module so that it checks its .pm file with a stat call to see how things are going. The data that we got from the stat reflected that the file was still old. We noticed that 'ls -al /the/directory/with/the/module/ ' would "fix" the desync... but that 'ls -al /the/directory/with/the/module/Module.pm' would not. We also noticed that an ls of the file in question would show the link count as 0 until it got "fixed", once fixed the link count was 1 again.

Am I missing a mount option.. or is there some way around this "feature" without doing and ls -alR of the whole thing to make sure all the modules are up to date?

My system info:
Ubuntu 10.10 server
2.6.35-30-server #60-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 19 21:00:00 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

nfs-common 1:1.2.2-1ubuntu1.1

Thanks for any help you have to offer.

--
Todd

Restarting the apache server should mean apache re-opens the module, which should be enough for NFS's close-to-open semantics.

If you're exporting ext3 on the server, it could be a time-resolution problem (ext3 has 1-second resolution timestamps), though I wouldn't expect that problem to reproduce so quickly.

If you're using NFSv4, it could be a delegation bug; run

echo 0 >/proc/sys/fs/leases-enable

and restart the nfs server to turn them off.

--b.