[Box-Admins] root cause of squeaksource.com outage

[David T. Lewis]

On Sun, Nov 06, 2016 at 07:43:23PM -0600, Chris Muller wrote:
> I think I just stumbled onto the root cause of the image growth.  I
> had downloaded the new production squeaksource.6.image (copy of the
> Oct-5 image) to my laptop to get a "data.obj" file exported.  This
> export process runs in the background and takes a long time, so when I
> came back to check on it, I found two debuggers with the message "Port
> not available."
> 
> What's happening is when the image is saved, it gets most of the way
> through SmalltalkImage>>snapshot:andQuit:embedded: so that the file is
> saved on disk, however, at the end it calls #processStartupList:
> whereupon SSRepository class>>#startUp: tells SSKom to start up.
> SSKom produces a debugger if you tell it to start when its already
> started.

I think I have seen that debugger notification before. That sort of thing
may happen occasionally, but not in any way that would accumulate into
an out of memory condition.

Whatever happened yesterday is different from the usual operation that
we have seen on squeaksource.com and source.squeak.org in recent years.
It is not just an error notification, it is some kind of failure that
improperly leads to an out of memory condition.

It would be helpful if we could get an export of the 'data.obj' from
squeaksource.5, which is the one that would have up-to-date account
information for the repository. The squeaksource.6 and squeaksource.4
images are one month out of date, and are not helpful in that regard.

Unfortunately squeaksource.5 is broken, and I don't know how to rescue
data.obj from that image.  Maybe Tim can get at it from a Cog simulator
image.

Dave


> 
> So the debuggers from the prior image save are slowly piling up within
> each subsequent image save, a slowly growing until it reached the
> limit.
> 
> I guess the bug should still be there; I guess I'm puzzled why this
> didn't happen on box2..
> 
> I think we should work on moving squeaksource to the new image ASAP.