[Zope] Data.fs grows rapidly in size and crashes Zope (solved)

[hpinson@indepthl.com]

The things I get myself into.  I hope this solution will be of help 
to others.

Let me first describe the problem.  My Zope data.fs was growing at a 
alarming rate.  Friday night, the 2GB file size was exceeded (the 
2.5.1 server hosts a popular political site, and has been up non-stop 
for about a month).   

The z2.log and STUPID_LOG_FILE revealed nothing odd. A tranalyzer run 
also showed zope behaving apparently normally.   

What else could it be?  Some malicious anonymous user triggering an 
insecure process?  That should show up in the logs.  More likely, it 
would be a programatic change that I had made myself, causing a 
runaway write process.  But I had not made any changes in over two 
weeks.  

Turns out that I had created a HostTracker counter object at about 
that time: http://www.zope.org/Members/Ioan/HostTracker

...which was merrily populating a table with the statistics of a busy 
site.  Kaboom!  I had forgotten to remove this, since getting AWStats 
to parse the Z2.log for multiple stand-alone Zope virtual hosted 
sites.  

So be careful with a HostTracker counter, especially if your site is 
busy. Don't forget to purge it regularly.  

Thanks to everyone who helped solve this!

Harlow Pinson
Indepth Learning
Email: hpinson@indepthl.com 
Web: http://www.indepthl.com
Voice: 505-994-2135
FAX: 208-475-7678