Smart search, face detection and OCR were all failing with
Machine learning request to "http://immich-machine-learning:3003" failed
while the container still reported Up. Podman only sees PID 1: gunicorn's
master was alive and holding the listening socket, but its worker had died at a
WORKER TIMEOUT and was never respawned -- hence a connect timeout rather than a
refusal. The dead worker was a zombie whose remaining thread was stuck in
uninterruptible sleep in exit_mmap, so it survived SIGKILL, podman rm -f and
rm -f -t 0, and kept the container name and network alias until the host was
rebooted.
MACHINE_LEARNING_MODEL_TTL=0 addresses the cause rather than the symptom. The
default unloads models after 300s idle, so every search following a gap
reloaded four of them (CLIP, buffalo_l detection + recognition, PP-OCRv5) on a
CPU-only 4-core box and then tore those mappings back down -- and that teardown
is what wedged. Keeping them resident costs ~1-2 GB and removes the path.
IMMICH_MACHINE_LEARNING_URL is now set explicitly instead of relying on
immich's implicit default, so the ML container can be renamed without silently
losing search, and the name is a variable so a replacement can be stood up
beside a broken one without editing tasks.
Verified after deploy: zero ML failures, "in-memory cache with unloading
disabled", ping 200 from immich-server, 26/26 containers healthy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TrueNAS was power-cycled, the CIFS mounts failed, and systemd never retried
-- mount units are not restarted on failure. SMB came back, nothing
remounted, and immich-server served an empty library for days while its
database still listed 14,181 assets pointing at /mnt/media/originals.
fstab carried no _netdev, no nofail and no automount, so there was no path
back without a human. Now:
x-systemd.automount any access re-attempts the mount; failure stops
being terminal
_netdev / nofail ordered after network-online, dead NAS cannot block boot
soft I/O errors instead of blocking forever, so the
container can be restarted rather than wedging in
uninterruptible sleep
idle-timeout unmount when unused, clearing stale handles
resilienthandles SMB3 rides out brief blips
ansible.posix.mount mounts directly and never starts the generated
.automount unit, leaving the on-access trigger inactive -- enable it
explicitly, or the headline fix silently does nothing.
The containers are systemd USER units while the mounts are SYSTEM units, so
RequiresMountsFor= is unavailable. cifs-watchdog bridges the scopes: checks
health, recovers, and restarts ONLY immich-server (the sole consumer of both
paths; postgres/redis/ML use local volumes).
Two bugs the umount test caught, both worth knowing:
- `ls` cannot test mountedness. An unmounted mount point is an ordinary
empty directory, so ls succeeds and recovery was skipped entirely.
- A drop repaired within a single run leaves prev=healthy, so keying the
restart solely on the stored state skipped it while the container still
held its stale view.
Also moves the SMB password out of /etc/fstab, which is 0644 and was
readable by every local user, into a 0600 credentials file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
