vaio --
Thanks for letting us know. Perhaps your system was making multiple attempts at the upload before allowing an unlock to complete. I will let knreed know that the problem has been resolved.

I cannot find anything wrong with the servers (and no evidence of a generalized problem). What happens is that when you start uploading the file is created on the file system and then locked by the process handling the upload. If the upload is interrupted, then the process handling the upload will hang around for several minutes (I would need to check the exact timeout) and then when apache decides the process is stale and more data is not coming it will then kill the process. At that time the lock on the file is released. If in the meantime, you attempt an upload again while the file is still locked, then you will see that message.

I believe that we have the timeout set to 5 minutes right now so it would take 5 minutes for the lock on the file to be released. If you attempted to force another update before that timeout then you would get that lock message. However, after that 5 minutes, you should be able to upload find. The BOINC backoff mechanism will probably jump to higher values during the meantime.

Let us know if it happens again. If it does, then there might be some network problems somewhere that is breaking the connection and causing this to occur.

We also might consider lowering this timeout value as well to reduce the number of stale connections.

thanks,
Kevin

Addendum:

Problem seems specific to my machine as I have 4 online and this is the only one showing said behaviour.