Unplanned reboots

Occasionally my Brightbox reboots without my requesting it. (Between 7 and 30 days or so.) It did it most recently 08.46 UTC today. Is this due to the physical server being rebooted, and to be expected, or is it something I should look into? Is there a way to check, a log file to look at?

Hi,

it’s certainly not to be expected, no. If there are any physical server issues, we’re alerted to them very quickly and we update our status blog with the details – there was nothing going on this morning for sure.

So, something is going wrong inside your Brightbox. If an app consumes too much ram on your Brightbox, it can affect other processes and even hang the box. There is usually evidence of this in the kernel log, though sometimes it can hang the box quicker than it can log anything. Try:

grep “Out of memory” /var/log/kern.log /var/log/kern.log.0

That will show you logs of processes being killed, this would be a clue something is using too much ram.

The default passenger settings allow up to 6 app instances to be running in total – if these are rails apps, this would be a bit of a challenge for a 256 box (especially if you have more than one application set up). You’ll need to tweak the settings a bit to limit the damage on a small box. I’m working on a Passenger tweaking guide at the moment which should help with this (it should have been done this week but it’s been delayed a bit – expect it next week on the blog).

Hope that helps,

John.

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, it looks very well like it’s down to memory use but hung before logging. An upgrade is needed.

I’m looking forward to your Passenger tweaking guide, especially if you can add some comments/wisdom that goes beyond the documentation.

Cheers,
Ian