[Zope-dev] Zope Server hanging :-(

Chris Withers chrisw@nipltd.com
Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:04:53 +0100


Hi,

Well, I thought the upgrade to 2.3.2b2 would solve the problem but it hasn't :-(
I have a (very important :-S) Zope instance which hangs at what seems like the
slightest touch.

The symptoms are as follows:
1. Go to a given URL, which doesn't respond (browser sits and spins)
2. Doing a 'top' on the server shows python nowhere to be seen (so it's not
infinite-loop-processor-hogging)
3. ps shows the python threads are all still there, but none of them will
respond.
3. doing a ./stop sucessfully stops Zope (the broswer returns a 'reset by peer')
4. doing a ./start yields the following the the stupid log file:

2001-04-27T15:05:38 PANIC(300) z2 Startup exception
Traceback (innermost last):
  File /usr/local/zope/Zope-2.3.2b2-src/z2.py, line 566, in ?
  File <string>, line 1, in ?
  File /usr/local/zope/Zope-2.3.2b2-src/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 110,
in ?
  File /usr/local/zope/Zope-2.3.2b2-src/lib/python/ZODB/FileStorage.py, line
264, in __init__
  File /usr/local/zope/Zope-2.3.2b2-src/lib/python/ZODB/lock_file.py, line 101,
in lock_file
StorageSystemError: Could not lock the database file.  There must be
another process that has opened the file.
<p>

5. The only way I can get Zope to start again is do do a:
killall -9 python

...now start behaves normally and the cycle begins again (averaging around once
every 10 minutes now :-( )

Can anyone suggest how I might go about tracking this down? It's really
beginning to piss me off. That said, I've seen quite a few posts now complaining
about Zope hanging and crashing, so I'm actually beginning to worry about using
Zope from a stability point of view.

Help!

Chris