RE: Piped logs and 1.3.x

["William A. Rowe, Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net>]

> From: Victor J. Orlikowski [mailto:v.j.orlikowski@gte.net]
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 9:54 AM
>
>    Looking for a suggestion on the best possible way to handle a
> bad situation:
>    A fellow has issued a problem report with piped logs and running
> out of disk space. The problem involves a ramp-up in traffic, and not
> enough space to contain the piped logs. The relevant lines in the
> fellow's httpd.conf are:
> 
> ErrorLog "|rotatelogs (his log dir)/error_log/86400"
> CustomLog "|rotatelogs (his log dir)/access_log 86400"
> 
>    Now, around the time he runs out of space, Apache stops serving
> requests, and the last few messages in the errorlog are:
> (his log dir)/accesslog.date: No space left on device
> 
>    Checking through the 1.3.x source, rotatelogs exits if it 
> cannot open(2) or write(2) to the desired log file. So, it would
> appear that Apache attempts to write to the pipe to log a request, 
> finds that the program died, tries to spawn it off again, and fails
> due to the lack of space. Then we attempt the logging/spawning cycle
> again, ad nauseum.

At minimum we must stop spinning processes.  A patch before 1.3.15
is rolled would be a very good thing.

Bill

Re: Piped logs and 1.3.x

[Jeff Trawick <tr...@bellsouth.net>]

"William A. Rowe, Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net> writes:

> > From: Victor J. Orlikowski [mailto:v.j.orlikowski@gte.net]
> > Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 9:54 AM
> >
> >    Looking for a suggestion on the best possible way to handle a
> > bad situation:
> >    A fellow has issued a problem report with piped logs and running
> > out of disk space. The problem involves a ramp-up in traffic, and not
> > enough space to contain the piped logs. The relevant lines in the
> > fellow's httpd.conf are:
> > 
> > ErrorLog "|rotatelogs (his log dir)/error_log/86400"
> > CustomLog "|rotatelogs (his log dir)/access_log 86400"
> > 
> >    Now, around the time he runs out of space, Apache stops serving
> > requests, and the last few messages in the errorlog are:
> > (his log dir)/accesslog.date: No space left on device
> > 
> >    Checking through the 1.3.x source, rotatelogs exits if it 
> > cannot open(2) or write(2) to the desired log file. So, it would
> > appear that Apache attempts to write to the pipe to log a request, 
> > finds that the program died, tries to spawn it off again, and fails
> > due to the lack of space. Then we attempt the logging/spawning cycle
> > again, ad nauseum.
> 
> At minimum we must stop spinning processes.  A patch before 1.3.15
> is rolled would be a very good thing.

Agreed here...  maybe use exponential backoff instead of stop

-- 
Jeff Trawick | trawick@ibm.net | PGP public key at web site:
     http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/9289/
          Born in Roswell... married an alien...