[Zope] Zope is hanging repeatedly

Granzow, Doug (NCI) granzowd@mail.nih.gov
Fri, 8 Mar 2002 09:03:29 -0500


I am having problems with a Zope installation hanging after running for
several minutes or hours.  This started a couple of days ago after Zope had
been running fine for the past few months.  Here are the details of the
installation:

- Zope 2.3.1  (old, but what I'm stuck with for now)
- Solaris 7
- Apache 1.3.19 with several virtual hosts
- the virtual hosts that connect to Zope are using mod_rewrite, some are
like this:

  RewriteRule ^/(.*) /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/$1
[e=HTTP_CGI_AUTHORIZATION:%1,t=application/x-httpd-cgi,l] [PT]

...while others are like this:

  RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://virtualhostname.com:8080/$1 [P]

(We are not using Virtual Host Monster -- just found out about that
yesterday)

When Zope hangs I notice that there are a lot of Zope.cgi processes running
on the system.  I am not sure, though, if Zope is hanging because of the
Zope.cgi processes, or if the Zope.cgi processes are hanging because of Zope
hanging.

One thing that concerns me is the size of our Data.fs file:

-rw-r--r--   1 zope     nobody   702930743 Mar  7 23:37 Data.fs

I know this needs to be packed, and I know the large size causes Zope to
take a long time to start up.  I don't have reason to believe that it is
causing Zope to hang, however.

When Zope hangs, the load average on the machine does not go up, Zope does
not take excessive CPU.  It seems to be just sleeping, perhaps waiting for
something external to happen.  The only solution I have found has been to
restart it, which only helps temporarily.  We initially suspected search
bots were hitting the site and overloading it (we were seeing connections
from googlebot.com).  We configured Apache yesterday to reject those
connections, but Zope still had problems last night.

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Doug