[rabbitmq-discuss] Rabbit crash (1.7.0)

Wed Apr 14 23:07:05 BST 2010

Jeremy,

Jeremy Dunck wrote:
>   We've had a Rabbit 1.7.0 daemon running since January, pretty much
> the same app load, no changes in client code which uses Rabbit.
> 
>   Today it crashed, complaining about too many open processes.  I've
> zipped up the rabbit.log and the erlang crash log.

Please accept the rabbit team's condolences on the death of your bunny. 
According to the logs it seemed to be in good health and spirit and then 
it suddenly collapsed.

There is nothing in the logs that points at the cause for reaching the 
process limit. It's possible that there is a very slow leak somewhere, 
but I cannot think of any place where that would be, unless your clients 
sometimes do something strange like create a queue that gets left 
behind. Hence it's probably worth keeping an eye in the number of queues 
with
   rabbitmqctl list_queues

To check whether there is a slow leak of processes, periodically run
   erl_call -sname rabbit at localhost -a 'erlang system_info [process_count]'
which returns the current process count. Depending on how you installed 
rabbit you may need the -c option to set the Erlang cookie, e.g.
   erl_call -c `cat /var/lib/rabbitmq/.erlang.cookie` -sname ...

The count will fluctuate as rabbit does its work, but if you see a 
general upward trend then please let us know.

Also, please upgrade to the latest version of RabbitMQ if it's not too 
much hassle. I don't think that will solve the problem, but it will make 
investigation easier if the problem reoccurs.

Here's hoping that the next incarnation of your bunny lives longer.

Regards,

Matthias.