[vox-tech] Crontab oddity - server timeout?

[Brian Lavender]

Did you figure it out?

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 03:22:06PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> 
> So I'm using lighttpd and fast_cgi, which occasionally has a problem where
> it gets 'stuck'.  (Unable to bring fast_cgi back to life, even though
> resources are once again available.)  Usually this results in Error 500s
> that never go away until lighttpd is restarted.
> 
> So to avoid having to manually go in and resurrect the server, I created
> a shell script that tries to hit the site, checks for an HTTP 200 response,
> and if it doesn't see that, it does a 'tail' of the access and error logs
> (so that I can see what was happening at the time), and then invokes an
> "/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart" to kick the server.
> 
> I've got the following crontab entry:
> 
> */2 * * * * root THE_SCRIPT
> 
> meaning it should run once every 2 minutes, all the time.  I only get an
> email when I produces output, and it only does that if it fails to
> contact the webserver.
> 
> However, when it does fail, I get numerous reports at once.  Could this
> be because the server isn't responding immediately when I check the status?
> 
> I'm doing that via, in the shell script:
> 
>   STATUS=`wget --save-headers http://www.MYSITE.com/ -O - 2> /dev/null | head -1 | cut -d " " -f 2`
> 
> In other words, hit the site, save the headers, save them out to stdout,
> chop off the "HTTP/1.1" to get the delicious "200" (hopefully) status.
> 
> 
> I guess maybe I need to give it a "--timeout" argument, and something
> less than 120 seconds, so that the jobs don't run over each other...?
> 
> -bill!
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/