[Zope] ZServer stops responding !? Help !?

[Paul Winkler]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2004 at 03:53:18PM -0400, Jean-Francois.Doyon at CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca wrote:
> of the problem.  The other 4 requests are for various content types. the
> content types themselves work fine, so I'm going ot take note of which ones
> they are and see if one keeps recurring or something.  Actually 2 of those
> do backend http calls, could there be some socket/timeout issue ?

Yes!
My 2.6.2 production zope server hung last week.
I spent a little time with this recipe:
http://www.zopelabs.com/cookbook/1073504990
... and traced the problem to an external method that
was using urllib2.urlopen().
I checked the same url using wget on the command line,
and sure enough, no response.

Apparently, in certain network conditions (e.g. a firewall
is blocking the thing you are trying to access), you can
sometimes wait literally forever for urllib2.urlopen() to finish.
In python 2.1, urllib2 offers no control
over timeouts.  2.3 or 2.2 added timeout handling to the 
underlying socket library, so maybe there's a way to do it now.

Oddly, in my case, zope apparently hung after only one or two requests
to the external method. That surprises me.

> The call
> is to a CGI on the very same server though, so I'm confident it's running
> fine.

*shrug*  that is odd.
 
-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's !
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)