[ic] IC + RedHat 7.x + Apache 1.3 = Segmentation fault?

Matthew T. Snyder interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Thu May 16 23:42:01 2002


Ed LaFrance wrote:

> Hi all -
>
> As a result of my consulting business I have access to may servers, and
> I've noticed a condition that appears in varying degrees on just
> about any
> machine that is running RH 7.x or a similar flavor of *nix,
> Apache 1.3x and
> Just about any Interchange version. The apache error_log on said machine
> contains entries like this:
>
> [Sun Sep 23 09:45:22 2001] [notice] child pid 6913 exit signal
> Segmentation
> fault (11)
> [Thu Sep 27 13:58:00 2001] [notice] child pid 7236 exit signal
> Segmentation
> fault (11)
>
> Frequency may be once a month, once a day or once every ten minutes - it
> seems to depend upon how may IC daemons are running on the server (all
> other things being equal, more daemons = more frequent segfaults).
>
> There is no discernable performance impact or other undesirable
> manifestation that I can detect, other than the error_log being
> larger than
> it would otherwise. I tried to compare the error_log entries to those in
> access_log and the system messages log, but have not found any pattern of
> correspondence.
>
> Because the properties of sampled severs do vary, the only thing
> I can say
> with reasonable certainty is that I've only seen this on machines running
> Interchange - spot checks of a few that don't show no such
> error_log entries.
>
> Can anyone comment on this. At first glance, lack of physical RAM was
> highly suspect, but so far tests with greatly increasing RAM and greatly
> reducing apache MaxClients has only freed up memory - frequency of the
> annoying error_log entries has not dimished. I have not yet
> played with IC
> server settings, but FWIW, in most cases it is running n low traffic mode
> with the default settings for the same. IC version varies widely.
>
> TIA for comments,
>
>
> Ed L.
>

Granted, the scenario I'm running here isn't under near the load as some of
your servers, but with RedHat7.2, IC 4.8.3, 512MB ram, and low traffic
settings, I'm not seeing any segmentation faults.  Should point out this is
not much more than a dev box at the moment, while I learn more about
interchange and tinker with it, so it probably only sees 2000 hits/day max.
That could be part of the issue.  The errors in the apache log for me mostly
show some poor joker trying to take advantage of a vulnerability in another
web server (not naming any names, of course:))

Matt