PHP hangning on futex wait View as Markdown

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Frederik Banke frederik@tigermedia.dkwrote:

Hi

I have a problem with my php, once in a while an apache process will hang.
In apache's /server-status it looks like:
11-1111941/3/588W 0.20213490179.30.2227.03 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
localhostGET xxx.php?xxx=xxxAs you can see from this line the process has

been working for 21349sec and the status is W (Sending Reply). I can se
from
top that the process uses 0% cpu.

I have been unable to find out what causes some of the processes to behave
like this. When I try the same request as a process that stalls it
finishes
with no problem. The problem is that the request uses alot of memory and
it
is never released so when there is many stalled processes the server
crashes. The stalled processes only occours on a few specific requests of
large searches so the page generation time is large for the request
(30sec+
range).

I have tried to setup another server with the same configuration to debug
but I'm unable to reproduce the problem. I suspect it to be related to
some
kind of deadlock that only occours in special cases, because of the futex
wait mentioned below.

With strace and gdb on the process i get:

strace -p 11194
futex(0x7f9fefee3a00, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL

(gdb) where
#0 0x00007f9fefc6a6de in ?? () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1 0x00007f9fefbf4025 in ?? () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2 0x00007f9fefbf026b in free () from /lib/libc.so.6
#3 0x00007f9fefb9fb6d in setlocale () from /lib/libc.so.6
#4 0x00007f9fe95d8e61 in zm_deactivate_basic () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#5 0x00007f9fe969d4ac in module_registry_cleanup () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#6 0x00007f9fe96a698b in zend_hash_apply () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#7 0x00007f9fe969bdad in zend_deactivate_modules () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#8 0x00007f9fe9656085 in php_request_shutdown () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#9 0x00007f9fe9711123 in ?? () from /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
#10 0x00007f9ff09e72d3 in ap_run_handler () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#11 0x00007f9ff09eaa6f in ap_invoke_handler () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#12 0x00007f9ff09f8430 in ap_internal_redirect () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#13 0x00007f9fe8c47bd5 in ?? () from
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so
#14 0x00007f9ff09e72d3 in ap_run_handler () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#15 0x00007f9ff09eaa6f in ap_invoke_handler () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#16 0x00007f9ff09f860e in ap_process_request () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#17 0x00007f9ff09f5448 in ?? () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#18 0x00007f9ff09eeca3 in ap_run_process_connection () from
/usr/sbin/apache2
#19 0x00007f9ff09fcf76 in ?? () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#20 0x00007f9ff09fd2ea in ?? () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#21 0x00007f9ff09fde1a in ap_mpm_run () from /usr/sbin/apache2
#22 0x00007f9ff09d360d in main () from /usr/sbin/apache2

So it looks like php hangs waiting for some futex. I have tried to
find the zm_deactivate_basic function but i have only found a macro
"#define ZEND_MODULE_DEACTIVATE_N(module) zm_deactivate_##module"

This seems to point to the module basic, but i can't find this module
anywhere so i suspect it to be some kind of internal/core "module".

Any ideas on how to proceed to find a solution?

/Frederik Banke

I can't help you, but in the past I did see apache processes got stuck for
some ajax requests, and because it was a third party application and I
didn't had the time to debug it properly, I ended up writing a simple
process which killed the long-running apache workers which stucked with the
W status.

Tyrael

I have done the same thing, but it is only a half solution. When the process
hangs the request will never finish and then a user will be sitting and
never get a reply.

So i hope of some more permanent fix.

/Frederik