Apache server keeps crashing, “caught SIGTERM, shutting down”

Question

This just started happening three weeks or so ago. The content of my website hasn\'t changed, it\'s just a phpBB forum using MySQL as a backend.

Nothing has chang

Answer 1

try to disable the rewrite module in ubuntu using sudo a2dismod rewrite. This will perhaps stop your apache server to crash.

Answer 2

SIGTERM is used to restart Apache (provided that it's setup in init to auto-restart): http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/stopping.html

The entries you see in the logs are almost certainly there because your provider used SIGTERM for that purpose. If it's truly crashing, not even serving static content, then that sounds like some sort of a thread/connection exhaustion issue. Perhaps a DoS that holds connections open?

Should definitely be something for your provider to investigate.

Answer 3

Apache is not running

It could also be something as simple as Apache not being configured to start automatically on boot. Assuming you are on a Red Hat-like system such as CentOS or Fedora, the chkconfig –list command will show you which services are set to start for each runlevel. You should see a line like

    httpd           0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

If instead it says "off" all the way across, you can activate it with chkconfig httpd on. OR you can start apache manually from your panel.

Answer 4

Have you asked your provider to investigate? I assume this is not a dedicated server,

On the face of it, this seems like a security exception and somone is trying to exploit it / or there is a process running at a set time which is causing this, can you think of anything that runs on the server every 2 days? Logging tools?

SIGTERM is the signal sent to a process to request its termination. The symbolic constant for SIGTERM is defined in the header file signal.h. Symbolic signal names are used because signal numbers can vary across platforms, however on the vast majority of systems, SIGTERM is signal #15.

Answer 5

I had mysterious SIGTERM shutdowns in our L.A.M.P. server, and it turned out to be an error in a custom PHP module, which was caused by mismatched versions. It was found by looking in the apache access/error logs at the time of malfunction. Don't forget to turn error logging on.

Answer 6

from this page:

I found this info:

The mod_fastcgi process manager isn't particularly patient though (there's room for improvement here) and since it has to shutdown too, sends a SIGTERM to all of the FastCGI applications it is responsible for. Apache will restart the process manager and it will restart its managed applications (as if the server was just started). SIGTERM is, well, SIGTERM - your application should exit quickly.

What this implies to me is that if Database I/O, or some other part of the CGI script, fails to respond in a timely fashion (ie getting slower with data-volume growth), that mod_fastcgi is killing the script......is that how other people interpret these docs or what am I missing..