Download Server Problems

The web server crashes related to the download subscription channels have appeared again on multiple occassions over the last two days. A fix has been put in place to stabilize the web services provided by the server. The rest of the article details the problem a little better.

Over the course of the last two days the Apache web server that serves content for www.coyotelinux.com, www.vortech.net, secure.vortech.net, and downloads.vortech.net has experienced several periods of downtime related to the Apache 2.0.40 web server daemon spiraling out of control and consuming the entire 512Mb of RAM and 512Mb of swap present in the server. While the cause has been traced to the interaction of Apache with the Kylix CGI application that streams content to users that are downloading from the Subscription Channels, there does not appear to be a good reason for the crashes.

The meer couple hundred lines of code that make up the download manager CGI have been gone over several time and the Apache configuration has been checked as well. It would appear to be a bug in the 2.0.40 Apache server that comes with Red Hat 8.0, but I can not personally reproduce the problem to attempt further debugging. However, individuals that trigger this bug during downloads seem to always be able to repeat the event.

As a temporary fix, the services for downloads.vortech.net (the virtual host responsible for delivering subscription content) have been moved to thttpd. I will continue to look into the cause of the problem and post any causes/solutions that I can come up with.

My apologies to those that have had trouble getting to their files recently.