[Zope] Zope stability

[Michel Pelletier]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Duterme [mailto:thomas@madeforchina.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 8:12 PM
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Zope stability
> 
> 
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> We are using Zope for one of our sites but Zope died as of yesterday.
> (refer to Chas' posts)  
> 
> This was totally out of the blue and is quite shocking.  
> (Zope is still
> down after 24 hours)

Just an aside, we do have excellent paid support.  It is not
unreasonably expensive and you get to talk directly to us and get a
prompt report of our analysis of your problem.
 
> The question I'd like to raise to the entire list regards 
> Zope's stability.
>  We are running Zope
> integrated with Apache off FreeBSD3.2 .  As far as I know, 
> this is not such
> an exotic setup (probably 

not exotic at all...

> rather common?).  As Chas explained previously, Zope just 
> suddenly died.
> Teodore also had the same
> error occur and solved it by rebooting his server.  
> 
> How often has this occured with other people?  Are there any 
> good solutions
> regarding providing a backup
> in case Zope does die?  (and keep the site running) Are there 
> any serious
> Zope instability issues which 
> need to be discussed and alerted?

Well, good back ups and all that are an excellent strategy.  Further, I
almost wonder if you had a backup of the site when it didn't have this
problem, if you fired a copy of that up on another port and the problem
went away.  As it stands now, it could be a bug in Zope, or something
changed on your system.

The most important part of debugging is reproduction.  Reproducing the
problem in a controled way can be the hardest part but it is the most
important.

As a stopgap so that you can get some sleep, you can set up a cron
script to reset the server every now and then either nicely (call the
servers manage_shutdown) or mean (send it a signal).

-Michel