www_server stops unexpectedly

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
Earlier this week, on December 11, at 12:20 our www_server just stopped. I've looked through the log, www_server_4998.log.1112.1231, but I don't see anything that gives me a clue.
We are a Solaris site, on SP 1323.

Resolution:
When a www_server is brought down by an aleph process, such as util w/2 or aleph_shutdown, its log has lines like the following:

Server received stop command
Server killing child pid: 21851
Server killing child pid: 21900
...

The end of the www_server_4998.log.1112.1231 has no such lines. This means that one of three things happened:

1. the www_server processes were terminated by a "kill" command
2. the www_server processes died of their own accord, without any indication in the log of a problem
3. the www_server processes continued existing but stopped responding

(I have never seen #2, but I suppose that it could happen.)

If/when this happens again, you should do "ps -ef | grep www_server" to distinguish case #3 from cases # 1 and 2.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013