ap_process_child_status() and child pid exit signal logging

[Kevin J Walters <Ke...@morganstanley.com>]

Hi,

I've noticed that all versions of apache (1.3 to 2.2) will produce
error log output like this,

[Mon Jan  1 00:00:00 2009] [notice] child pid 12345 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

In the case of a segmentation fault or anything that produces a core
dump this is a relatively serious error but it's only marked at notice
level due to setting of APLOG_NOTICE in the code.

I had a look in latest trunk version and i see
ap_process_child_status() has moved into mpm_unix.c but no changes wrt
this logging from the default: case.

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/server/mpm_unix.c?revision=808895&view=markup#l388

Should this be increased in severity?  APLOG_ERR?

I can see the benefit for anyone grep'ing for or automatically
scanning/processing logs for unexpected conditions based on the
[severity] tag. The core dumps might be more severe because of their
ability to consume large amounts of disk space, particularly for folk
using unique core names.


regards

|<evin

-- 
Kevin J Walters                      Morgan Stanley
kjw@ms.com                           25 Cabot Square
Tel: 020 7425 7886                   Canary Wharf
Fax: 020 7056 6401                   London E14 4QA

Re: ap_process_child_status() and child pid exit signal logging

[Jeff Trawick <tr...@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Kevin J Walters
<Ke...@morganstanley.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've noticed that all versions of apache (1.3 to 2.2) will produce
> error log output like this,
>
> [Mon Jan  1 00:00:00 2009] [notice] child pid 12345 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
>
> In the case of a segmentation fault or anything that produces a core
> dump this is a relatively serious error but it's only marked at notice
> level due to setting of APLOG_NOTICE in the code.

APLOG_NOTICE is special:  Such messages cannot be suppressed by any
LogLevel setting.  I guess that is behind the choice of APLOG_NOTICE.

There's some inconsistency w.r.t. other log messages though.  Child
process crashes aren't as serious as some other errors that use
APLOG_CRIT or APLOG_EMERG.  So why are those other error messages
suppressible?