Lighttpd

I'm running lighttpd-1.4.20 and PHP 5.2.4 (cgi-fcgi) with PHP scripts connecting to other webservers. Those other webservers become non-responsive and causing Lighty to time-out after 360 seconds and receiving partial content. Lighty grows about 20MB a day.

Because I run those applications on a VPS with limited RAM, I cannot attach Valgrind to the process. The traffic pattern is unpredictable. But I strongly suspect the partial content with time-out was the cause.

So I wrote a simple test program (lighty-leaky.php, attached) which sleeps 400 seconds before completing the transaction. This simulates the situation cited above. Traffic is simulated with

   ab -n 100 -c 80 -k http://f8/lighty-leaky.php?loop=10800
   ab -n 100 -c 50 http://f8/lighty-leaky.php?loop=10800

The 'loop' control the size of the partial content. Lighty growed close to 7MB after a few tries.

% top -bn 1 | grep lighttpd

11493 apache    20   0  5784  988  624 S    0  0.2   0:00.00 lighttpd
after
11493 apache    20   0 12508 7932  832 S    0  1.5   0:02.28 lighttpd

And the following error log occurred

2008-12-19 00:41:44: (server.c.1247) NOTE: a request for /lighty-leaky.php?loop=10800 timed out after writing 2758099 bytes.  We waited 20 seconds. If this a problem increase server.max-write-idle

2008-12-19 00:42:33: (mod_fastcgi.c.2926) backend is overloaded; we'll disable it for 2 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 130
2008-12-19 00:42:33: (mod_fastcgi.c.3568) all handlers for /lighty-leaky.php on .php are down.
2008-12-19 00:42:36: (mod_fastcgi.c.2681) fcgi-server re-enabled:  0 /var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket

The first log recurred multiple times, presumably corresponds to the number of requests. I set server.max-write-idle = 20 in configuration to shorten the wait.

After that, Lighty never managed to reconnect to the backend. Requests return 500 error.

I'm using "mod_rewrite", "mod_access", "mod_auth", "mod_status", "mod_setenv", "mod_fastcgi", "mod_simple_vhost", "mod_compress", "mod_expire", "mod_rrdtool", "mod_accesslog" . My FastCGI configuration

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
                   ( "localhost" =>
                     (
                       "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                       "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
                       "bin-environment" =>
                       (
                        "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "32",
                        "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "4000" 
                       ),
                       "bin-copy-environment" => ( "PATH", "SHELL", "USER" ),
                       "min-procs" => 1,
                       "max-procs" => 1,
                       "max-load-per-proc" => 8,
                       "idle-timeout" => 50,
                       "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable" 
                      )
                    )
                  )

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.