[Zope] Re: Catatonic Zope Server

[Malcolm Cleaton]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:15:25 +0100, Dieter Maurer wrote:

> Malcolm Cleaton wrote at 2004-12-17 11:30 +0000:
>> ...
>>Recently, the disk containing Data.fs became full, and we had some strange
>>conflict errors, where the error message appeared to suggest that our
>>transaction had caused a conflict because it had started many hours ago,
>>which of course it hadn't.
> 
> Usually, the dates are reliable -- unless your system has severe
> memory problems...

The strange time-travel commit errors seemed very deterministic while they
were happening, including continuing to happen after restarting servers
(until the Data.fs was truncated).

> 
>>....
>>But
>>now, the server has gone into a catatonic state just after a restart, at
>>least twice. In this state, nothing appears in the Z2 or event logs, and
>>requests for pages appear to mostly time out (although apache, for
>>whatever reason, served up empty responses with a 200 ok code for some
>>Zope requests during this time).
> 
> Startup problems (these are those where nothing appears in the
> event log file) are best analysed via:
> 
>       export EVENT_LOG_FILE=<logfile name>
>       bin/runzope
> 
> You should see all log messages in the file identified
> by "<logfile name>" -- even those that are usually
> suppressed (for an arcane feature).

Thanks - this looks useful. Of course, now I've posted to the list the
server is behaving itself, but if/when this happens again I'll surely try
this.

>>The server sits in this dead state until it is restarted. The last time it
>>happened, it would not restart correctly until zeo had also been restarted.
> 
> There is a HowTo about "Debugging a spinning Zope".
> It may help you to analyse the problem.

And I'll try this too.

> However, from your description, I would not trust your server. Maybe,
> there is some hardware problem.
> 
> We, too, run busy Zope sites and have not seen any of your problems.

The server has been very reliable up to now. A hardware problem is
possible, but it feels more like there is a repeatable problem here just
beyond my understanding. If I find out any more, I'll let you know.

Thanks,
Malcolm.

-- 

    [] j a m k i t
      web solutions for charities

         malcolm cleaton
T:  020 7549 0520
F:  020 7490 1152
M:  07986 563852
W: www.jamkit.com