Fixing Crashing Servers


Sometimes you'll have problems with your AOLserver and it can be difficult to track down exactly what's going wrong. Here's some common problems as well as techniques for tracking down the problem.

Known Problems

Crashes or spontaneous restarts when using Oracle

Make sure the StackSize parameter in [ns/parameters] is set to something large (like 100000)

This is really easy to miss! Check this out before burning a lot of time doing other things.

Crashes with POSTed data

AOLserver 2.3.2 will crash if a POST is done for an URL that doesn't have a registered handler.

Crashes with CGI

Sometimes AOLserver will crash if a CGI request ends with a trailing slash.

Crash Diagnostic Techniques

Database-related problems

General

Running AOLserver in a debugger

This works best if you're using AOLserver 2.3.3.

Machine-specific tricks

Solaris

Solaris has a cool command called "truss", which will show all system calls being made by a program. If you get an undecypherable message from AOLserver, sometimes looking at the system calls and their return codes can point to the problem.

To run with truss, AOLserver can't work normally and create the child process which does the actual page serving. You'll need to run with the -N 'child process only' mode:


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