Oozie stuck in PREP state

Question

I have a problem with running oozie coordinator jobs. Below is my job properties and xml file codes. While submitting the job there was no errors, but the job is always in 'PREP' state. I have to manually kill the job after some extent of waiting. When executing the workflow job separately, it was completed successfully.

Can you please let me know what could be wrong in my co-ord job?

Here is my coordinator.xml

Here is my coordinatorjob.properties

Thanks,

Kalai

Dolores

Hi, workflow job itself stuck in PREP state for oozie 4.0.1? Have you faced the problem ever? – Sylvan

Answer 1

Coordinator is in status PREP when it's start time is in the future. Start time in your config is 2014-02-25 11:31 UTC, so if you submitted in at the time of posting the question (2014-02-25 06:45 UTC) it still had about 5 hours to wait in PREP status before creating the first materialization and switching to RUNNING. See documentation about status transitions.

Naima

Thank you. The timezone in the properties have been mentioned as GMT+0530, so i have set the start and end time for the job in IST values. So can you please let me know what is the correct approach to schedule the jobs in IST timezone? Thanks – Dolores

From docs: "Oozie processes coordinator jobs in a fixed timezone with no DST (typically UTC), this timezone is referred as 'Oozie processing timezone'". Timezone specified for particular coordinator affects only some daylight-saving stuff. So, the simplest way is to schedule jobs in UTC. – Naima

Hi, workflow job itself stuck in PREP state for oozie 4.0.1? How to solve that? i just load a file and store into new file using pig. I validated workflow.xml. – Sylvan

@Sylvan Check the port addresses for resource manager and namenode in the job.properties and try re-submitting the job. – Dolores

Yeah i made a mistake on specifying port number. Now it works... Thanks @kalai – Sylvan

Answer 2

Synchronous jobs (individual jobs, not coordinator jobs, etc.) do the actual work while being in PREP state. It's the case of the SSH Action for example (even though there it is a little more complicated because the java code happens synchronously but the remote shell script is executed asynchronously).

In your case, I think Dmitry's answer is the more helpful one, but it's good to keep in mind that there can be other reasons for being in the PREP state too.

Animosity

Interesting. According to the docs coordinator starts materializing workflow jobs only when it's RUNNING. How can SSH action start to execute before workflow job materialization? – Naima

I was talking about individual jobs, not about workflows or "coordinator jobs". I know that it doesn't directly address the question but IMHO the more info about Oozie there is the better given how bad documentation it has and given how convoluted piece of software it is. – Animosity