CouchDB/Erlang Crash on startup.

[Delfino Gustavo]

Hi all,

Suddenly my CouchDB 2.1.1 (under Windows 7) is not starting up. It seems to be crashing even before it has the opportunity to write anything to the couch.log file. I do get an erl_crash.dump file that is constantly being recreated as the service tries to restart. The dump file quite large (about 600k) so I made a gist of it instead of posting directly:

https://gist.github.com/gdelfino/93694bfa0b1b92caa25a279b8467042e

Any advice?

Regards,

Gustavo Delfino

[Joan Touzet]

What happens if you run C:\CouchDB\bin\couchdb.cmd from an Administrator command prompt?

-Joan

[Delfino Gustavo]

I get this

kernel-poll not supported; "K" parameter ignored
{error_logger,{{2018,4,24},{11,42,11}},"inet_parse:~p:~p: erroneous line, SKIPPED~n",["c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts",92]}
(...similar line repeats a few hundred times...)
{error_logger,{{2018,4,24},{11,42,11}},"inet_parse:~p:~p: erroneous line, SKIPPED~n",["c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts",1081]}
[os_mon] win32 supervisor port (win32sysinfo): Erlang has closed
{"Kernel pid terminated",application_controller,"{application_terminated,couch_log,shutdown}"}

I don't see anything suspicious in the c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts file. In fact it has a 2013 modification date.

Regards,

Gustavo

[Joan Touzet]

And what happens if you remove/rename that file temporarily?

[Delfino Gustavo]

I renamed hosts to host.old and now it continues to crash, but the error messages are reduced to:

kernel-poll not supported; "K" parameter ignored

[os_mon] win32 supervisor port (win32sysinfo): Erlang has closed
{"Kernel pid terminated",application_controller,"{application_terminated,couch_log,shutdown}"}

Crash dump is being written to: erl_crash.dump...done
Kernel pid terminated (application_controller) ({application_terminated,couch_log,shutdown})

Any other idea? I could try reinstalling CouchDB

[Joan Touzet]

Check where you have logs logging to. That path may not exist, or CouchDB may have lost write access to it.

If that fails you can try a reinstall.

[Delfino Gustavo]

Thank you Joan. It is now up and running!

There permissions were fine and reinstalling didn't help. However, the log file was just too big (almost 100GB):

103 729 004 497 bytes (Size)
103 729 004 544 (Size on disk)

After getting rid of the old couch.log CouchDB started OK.

I should probably look into adding a log rotation solution (any advice?). Also, I guess that there should be a more useful error message for this.

I was not aware of a 100G log file limit. This HD has plenty of free space and is formatted with NTFS. I am reading that the maximum file size for NTFS should be much higher than that.
In order to get rid of the old log file, I had to move it to another directory. I first tried to rename it, but I couldn't as Windows gave this error:

Error 0x80070299: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation.