iplanet issues

[A Pandey]

Hi,

I am running WebAdvisor (from Datatel) running on iplanet running on HPUX 11.00 (L1000).

During student registration time (currently) I get the following error message about every 1 hour. The system hangs up - that is the webserver is not accessible and I need to restart the webserver again.

Also I have noticed that the ns-httpd process hogs > 100% of cpu resources while it hangs up.

any ideas.

tvmia.

ap.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Possible issues from a systems standpoint:

1) System is simply overloaded. Too many things are happening at the same time and you need to restrict the number of simultaneous logins. Perhaps you could task another server to balance the load.

2) You don't have kernel parameters set appropriately for high load. Any change will require a boot. check, nproc, nfile and maxuprc

The last one there defaults to 75 and is the maximum number of processes any user can have. Since iplanet is owned by a single user, high load times like registration will overload it. Try 200 or even higher. nproc must also be increased

3) General performance problems: collect performance data with the attached script and see where the bottleneck is.

4) Run gpm and see if there are other unmentioned system variables that are being maxed out.

From the iplanet perspective, the product may have logs, and they should be examined for error messages that would be useful in figuriing this all out.

SEP

[A Pandey]

thnks with that script.

I get the following error log entry:

15/Nov/2004:11:55:52] config ( 5977): SIGFPE 8* arithmetic exception

[15/Nov/2004:11:55:52] config ( 5977): si_signo [8]: SIGFPE 8* arithmetic exception

[15/Nov/2004:11:55:52] config ( 5977): si_errno [0]: Error 0

[15/Nov/2004:11:55:52] config ( 5977): si_code [13]: FPE_COND [addr: 0xc157b113]

[15/Nov/2004:11:55:52] config ( 5977): stackpointer=69F888C8

Other than this:

nproc = 1024
maxuprc = 256


Could maxdsiz/maxtsiz/maxssiz have anything to do with this?

thanks again.

[RAC_1]

Is the process config, part of Webadviser software?? In that case you need to talk to them also.

When you get this error?? Do you experience performance problems?? Which one - cpu, network, disk??
Also do you hot any of the kernel tunables??
check with
sar -v 5 5

Anil

[Steven E. Protter]

Seems we have entered the realm of iplanet issues. I think you have an application issue and need to obtain patches.

SEP

[A Pandey]

what is 'hot' kernal tunables mean? sorry for dumb question.

Also the config process (i think) is basically an instance of the iplanet running. when i get the above errors in the error log the registration page is not accessible...basically spinning IE icon and nothing else.

i need to tune the iplanet and/or HPUX kernel in such a way that this does not happen. we are small college and students at online registration aren't too many (about 200 at a time).

[rick jones]

I suppose the most comprehensive patch to iPlanet would be to install Zeus :) It even does NSAPI.

Still, SIGFPE sounds like something along the lines of a divide by zero or something. I suppose running-out of memory could cause chasing a bad pointer going into lala land and getting some bad numbers on which to perform math.

[Steven E. Protter]

hot tunables probably refers to kernel parameters. I mentioned some of the most important in such issues.

kmtune will list them all for you.

SEP