Hello,
I am running heudiconv (0.11.6) with singularity on a HPC cluster and I am getting the following warning:
WARNING: Existing lockfile found in /base/nifti/heudiconv.lock - waiting for the lock to be released. To set a timeout limit, set the HEUDICONV_FILELOCK_TIMEOUT environmental variable to a value in seconds. If this process hangs, it may require a manual deletion of the /base/nifti/heudiconv.lock.
It looks like after deleting /base/nifti/heudiconv.lock., it keeps generating a new one.
What would be a ‘good’ value for HEUDICONV_FILELOCK_TIMEOUT ?
Do you run multiple heudiconv in parallel? I would assume “yes” and that is why you get this warning. It is ok to not set it to any value – it would just wait without a limit. Do you see any heudiconv process getting suck/hanging?
Yes, I am running multiple heudiconv in parallel. And yes, sever heudiconv processes are hanging. Any idea about what could cause it?
And, there is no need to delete /base/nifti/heudiconv.lock. ?
the fact that you’re running multiple heudiconv in parallel.
I would assume no – processes should wait until the other process frees access to it. But if there was interference from the user/batch system (lock file removal, process killing) - may be the locking somehow lead to stalling. Did you remove it manually? (I guess that might have confused it somehow).
I thought that may be there could be some issue with the filelock and NFS (I assume you use) – Reliable over NFS? · Issue #73 · tox-dev/py-filelock · GitHub suggests that it should be all ok if you are on some modern system. but it could be not working on correctly with linux < 2.6.5 but you don’t have it that old, do you?
FWIW, in the future you could also run it with --bids notop in parallel and then eventually have a single run with just --bids to produce/update those top level files. This way there would be no competition etc.
yes… after each participant conversion heudiconv adjusts top level files, and that is where collision happens.
not really beyond “just add it to your invocation” and
❯ heudiconv --help | grep -3 notop
None.
-b [BIDSOPTION1 [BIDSOPTION2 ...]], --bids [BIDSOPTION1 [BIDSOPTION2 ...]]
Flag for output into BIDS structure. Can also take
BIDS-specific options, e.g., --bids notop. The only
currently supported options is "notop", which skips
creation of top-level BIDS files. This is useful when
running in batch mode to prevent possible race
conditions.
well it is not saying it directly… uname -a could be more informative. Or even better, if you have datalad installed, then output of datalad wtf -S system
Hello,
I don’t have datalad installed. With uname I’m getting the following: Linux login03 4.18.0-240.el8.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 25 19:48:47 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I am not really sure how to get the participants.tsv file after using the --bids notop option. Do you have an example by chance?
Thanks!
If using bids, the notop bids option suppresses creation of top-level files in the bids directory (e.g., dataset_description.json ) to avoid possible race conditions. These files may be generated later with populate_templates.sh below (except for participants.tsv , which must be created manually).
So, I am afraid, you are “doomed” to create that file manually now. Since after the conversion we have no guaranteed access to original dicoms, and participant age/sex metadata was not extracted – we can’t really populate it reliably. And populating basic one is as easy as smth like
for s in sub-*; do grep -q -e "^$s\s" participants.tsv || echo -e "$s\tn/a\tn/a" >> participants.tsv; done
and