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

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Matthew T. Snyder (snydermt@ariontech.com):
> Ed LaFrance wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> >
> 
> 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:))
> 

This is almost undoubtedly the Perl signal problem. If you search for the
long-running thread on PGP and PayFlow problems with completing transactions,
the solution will boil down to running in PreFork mode with MaxServers set
to 0 to disable all signals.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike@perusion.com>

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