Re: [Summary-Talk] process exited abnormally

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/3/03 10:11 AM Nick Davis (ndavis@iexposure.com) wrote:

>I usually get this error message in my logs "One of our processes 
>exited abnormally!". I'm guessing the system ran out of memory and then 
>killed one of the processes. The problem is the process that exited is 
>the one that is downloading all of the logs files. So summary just
>quit's downloading log files, does the DNS lookups and then quits.
>
>Check log header: site.log.51.gz
>One of our processes exited abnormally!

Your problem has nothing to do with log downloading. I can see from the 
bit of Summary's log that you quoted that log downloading has completed 
without problems, and Summary has moved on to checking the headers of 
each of the log files. I also very much doubt that this has anything to 
do with memory. Checking log headers doesn't take any significant amount 
of memory.

If the problem is always happening in the same place, that is directly 
after checking the header on site.log.51.gz, I would suspect that there 
is some kind of problem with that particular log file. If it happens 
after a different log file each time then we need to look for some other 
cause.

You might want to check your /var/log/messages file (a Linux thing) 
around the time that Summary exits. Sometimes there is a message in there 
that explains what happened. If you are running out of swap space, or any 
other system resources, there would be a message in there.

Another thing you can try is to load a recent backup, on Summary's Tools 
configuration page. It is remotely possible that your database is corrupt 
in some subtile way, and restoring a backup will generally fix any 
database corruption that might be present.

>Is there a way you could make summary keep a state variable so it knows 
>what work needs to be done yet if one of the processes fail? Then one of
>the remaining processes can take charge of the work the exited process
>was doing? Or something like that, so the log processing won't just quit
>without finishing.

Try as we might, it is impossible to write software that is free of 
problems. Summary does keep track of where it left off, and will try the 
operation again. If the operation succeeds once in a while Summary will 
be able to get past that point. If it fails every time, doing something 
that needs to get done, then there isn't any way to finish log processing.

This looks very much like a bug in Summary, but there are some other 
possibilities. I would like to try to duplicate the problem here. Would 
it be possible for you to send me (directly, not to the list) your 
configuration file (./config/summary.conf)?

Jason

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Jason@Summary.Net
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example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
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