CouchDB stopped - no reason why?

[Nicholas Orr]

Hi,
I came in this morning to find that CouchDB was not running.
Looking in the log there was nothing to say why it had stopped.
From what I can tell it just went away...

The log level is set to info and the last request was me before I went home.
Is there anything I can set / look at to figure out why couchdb chose to
stop running?

Thanks,

Nick

[Nicholas Orr]

version 0.9.0

[Christopher Lenz]

I've had this problem in the past on Debian when using the precompiled
Erlang packages. Throwing that off the system and just installing
Erlang from source made the problem go away. And this was not the
first time I've had obscure (and impossible to debug) problems with
Erlang as a system package on Debian.

Just in case your setup in similar.

Cheers,
--
Christopher Lenz
cmlenz at gmx.de
http://www.cmlenz.net/

[Nicholas Orr]

Yes my setup is similar - Ubuntu and installed erlang using apt
Now I got figure this out... How I love Gentoo and portage.

VMWare ESX doesn't support Gentoo as a guest - so I can't use Gentoo with
this host :(

CouchDB was installed from source...

Thanks Christopher

Nick

[Nicholas Orr]

That was pretty painless...
Installed otp_src_R12B-5

so I'll see how it goes.

Nick

[Noah Slater]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 08:59:24AM +0200, Christopher Lenz wrote:
> I've had this problem in the past on Debian when using the precompiled
> Erlang packages. Throwing that off the system and just installing Erlang
> from source made the problem go away. And this was not the first time
> I've had obscure (and impossible to debug) problems with Erlang as a
> system package on Debian.

Interesting, and the first time I've heard about it.

Did you file a bug so that me or Sergei Golovan could look into it?

We can't fix problems unless they are reported! ;)

Thanks,

--
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater

[Christopher Lenz]

On 24.07.2009, at 16:50, Noah Slater wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 08:59:24AM +0200, Christopher Lenz wrote:
>> I've had this problem in the past on Debian when using the
>> precompiled
>> Erlang packages. Throwing that off the system and just installing
>> Erlang
>> from source made the problem go away. And this was not the first time
>> I've had obscure (and impossible to debug) problems with Erlang as a
>> system package on Debian.
>
> Interesting, and the first time I've heard about it.
>
> Did you file a bug so that me or Sergei Golovan could look into it?

No, because the problem didn't leave any trace of itself. No core
dump, nothing in any of the logs, nada. I have no information other
than "every couple of days, with greatly varying frequency, the
CouchDB process would simply be gone."

Not stuff that makes a useful bug report, unfortunately :/

[Chris Anderson]

Maybe something wrong with heart on the packaged Erlang?

--
Chris Anderson
http://jchrisa.net
http://couch.io

[Noah Slater]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 02:59:03PM -0700, Chris Anderson wrote:
> Maybe something wrong with heart on the packaged Erlang?

Any way to test for this?

Say, introduce an intentional bug that crashes your local CouchDB?

[tre...@nooro.com]

Hit a similar problem this morning; couch has stopped, and doesn't want to
restart:

/etc/init.d/couchdb start
Starting database server: couchdb.
/etc/init.d/couchdb status
Apache CouchDB is not running.

This is running vesion 0.9.0 from source, on Debian.

Any suggestions?

[Manolo Padron Martinez]

Try to lauch directly and see whats the log say (I mean launch
/usr/bin/couchdb) . With more info we can be helpfull.

Regards from Canary Islands

Manuel Padrón Martínez

[tre...@nooro.com]

/bin/couchdb
{"init terminating in
do_boot",{undef,[{crypto,start,[]},{erl_eval,do_apply,5},{init,start_it,1},{init,start_em,1}]}}

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
init terminating in do_boot ()

erl_crash.dump is ~10,000 lines long; not really sure what I should be
looking for here.

[tre...@nooro.com]

Following the advice at
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Ubuntu seemed to resolve the
problem. I guess somehow our system removed some dependencies it didn't
think were need any more.

Thanks for your help; not seeing any error message at all was throwing me.

Trevor

[Noah Slater]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:40:24AM -0400, tre...@nooro.com wrote:
> Following the advice at
> http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Ubuntu seemed to resolve the
> problem. I guess somehow our system removed some dependencies it didn't
> think were need any more.

Did you install from source originally?

That would explain why some dependancies might have been removed.

If you installed the couchdb package directly, this is a bug.

[tre...@nooro.com]

Yes, I installed the dependencies from apt-get but couch itself from
source, to get the latest version.

I think this is just an issue with Debian cleaning up packages it doesn't
think are needed anymore, or possibly an over-zealous sysadmin.

[Nicholas Orr]

Well having erlang compiled from source has not helped :/
Think all I can do is install monit and use it to restart couchdb when it
stops

I'll turn debug logging on and see what happens too.

(Linux 2.6.24-19-server x86_64)

Nick