Thanks to my ISP ?
This may, or may not, be related to my router problems yesterday, that caused connections to drop without notice. Or in another way, since I have no longer the ability to block addresses of networks (since the firewall in that router misses this facility).
Normally, I start SoyMail at work and keep it open all day. It checks for new messages every 15 minutes. Runs silently (Windows sound machine muted 🙂 and no trouble at all). Except for today, where all of a sudden sync failed during retrieval of messages. Restarting fails with a 503 error: “This service is currently unavailable”. Trying some time later, nothing is wrong.
So I started the Admin site, and found System not responsive; however, other actions would work. I found a large number of accesses to this blog, many in idle state, but they could still be active. At some point, I could access the System report and indeed: there were quite a lot of WASD processes that run PHP_WASD, given the current working set. The only way, I could think of, was deleting them, but that didn’t help, so I fugured that is I would purge the idle processes, these would go.
They didn’t.
So the next thing was restartNow. It solved the problem a bit: I could now show the System report and found a large number of PDP_WASD images still around;bur Soymail could be reaccessed and haply refreshed the contents. For a few hours, when the very same happened again. I just restarted WASD, and found even more remaining PHP_WASD processes in LEF state, even LEFO. It solved the issue for an hour, but at that time, to no avail.
It seems all process slots were taken.
Back home, I tried to kill these processed, but even STOP/ID failed, except for one or two. But there were over 60 of them (my processcount is maximized to 110) and the only way to get rid of them easily was to reboot Diana.
That settled the issue, but question remains: how can this happen? I’ve done some investigation and details will be made public later – let the experts look at it first….
A quick look at the number of connections shows that some time today, I have had far more a second (or minute) than I have had ever before. There are some spikes at times but I blocked these networks in the Vigor router, so these would have no opportunity to access ANY service on the LAN. But I am now forced to use the Fritzbox supplied by my ISP. It offers a better IPV6 connectivity (something still not well working on the Vigor – at least not with my ISP) and a more robust telephone connectivity (the Vigor may drop connections – or that is related to the issues I have encountered) but it simply lacks a firewall that allows me to block traffic – and it lacks external logging via syslogd. But it’s the only one they support – officially…
Well, that food for some other rant 🙂