Re: The way Apache is restarted and the WO adaptor

Stefan, Laura

Our setup on a pretty old G4 has been running pretty stable for quite 
some while. And it's not easy to say exactly when things started to get 
ugly. We continuously installed more apps on the server, but the  the 
processor is still more than 75% idle. Fact is that our apps become 
unavailable quite often now although they're still up and running. 
Sometimes the wo adaptor acts up (we think this started when we 
activated mod_rewrite on one of our sites) and more recently wotaskd 
seems to go crazy. But...
- we could not track down to problem yet
- we did not find a proper way to restart WO without restarting the 
whole box
- every time we think we might have found a symptom (like too many 
CLOSE_WAIT connections listed by the lsof command) it turns out that we 
cannot use it to reliably watch the server...
- in short: We have no clue how to resolve these problems.

We decided quite a while ago that we wanted "real" server hardware and 
that we would go with Solaris (our other servers are already SUN 
boxes). So it's not just the recent problems with WO deployment that 
drove us to that decision.

As I said before: I really would like to have a couple of Xserve four 
our deployment, but it's not really what we need and when it comes to 
deployment I have to respect other opinions to in our company ;-)

-Will

On Friday, January 9, 2004, at 06:06 PM, Stefan Apelt wrote:

> Hi Will,
>
> your mail from 09.01.2004, 17:47:
>
>> Damn! We just bought a Sun server because we gave up on WebObjects on
>> MacOS X Server because of problems like the one you're describing. Now
>> you're telling us that wotaskd / wo adaptor is flunky on Solaris too?
>> Very encouraging. I think I'll move to Tomcat!
>
> I  don't  know about the differences in JVM implementation for Solaris
> vs.  MacOS  vs. Linux. We have Linux 2.4.x+Java 1.4.x+WO 5.2.x running
> for around a year now and wotaskd never made problems (1 web server, 2
> app  servers,  1 db server, ~20 apps, ~50 instances, lots of requests,
> servers  are  connected  via switched Gigabit ethernet). I did not try
> JDK  1.3.1  on  Linux  but  with 1.4, it works very well. I don't know
> about Linux on Sun either, for that matter. :)
>
> By  the  way,  we almost never restart Apache nor wotaskd (well, three
> times  a year or so for upgrading). Is this really necessary? Or could
> it  be a performance or timing issue, eg. that you have a slow network
> connection  between servers, broken cable, poorly written network card
> driver or something like that which drives wotaskd crazy? In that case
> a new server might not help much...
>
> -- 
> Regards,
>  Stefan
>