NodeBB Dies

[julian]

You should really use ./nodebb start to keep NodeBB running instead. The built-in loader removes the need for forever or supervisor

[Guiri]

@julian That's fine, I made the changes to crontab. Still, the app will still die at random intervals and I don't see anything in the logs regarding this.

[Xiph]

@Guiri A lot of programs semi-randomly die due to running out of resources, and it's no big secret Apache is big on the ol' server load. Is your resource usage (especially RAM) consistently maxed out or contain massive spikes around the times NodeBB crashed?

[Guiri]

@Xiph Thanks for the tip. I switched to Nginx with a Varnish frontend and my RAM usage decreased from 1.2G to 600M. Thanks! Still, NodeBB randomly died a few hours in. Could the Node process need configuring RAM or SWAP wise? I'm really curious why it's dying. I'm also starting it via ./nodebb start as @julian advised.

[markkus]

I can't really tell if I'm experiencing the same situation, however, every now and then after about 24-36h NodeBB randomly ''dies'' & when it does that, it displays error 502, which I can only resolve with rebooting the VPS. I'm also running it with nginx proxy & NodeBB is started on every reboot using ./nodebb start in an init.d service.

[julian]

@markkus Can you paste your initscript?

[markkus]

@julian
#! /bin/bash
# /etc/init.d/nodebb

 case "$1" in
    start)
        echo "Starting NodeBB..."
        cd /home/nodebb/foorum 
         ./nodebb start 
        ;;
     stop)
        echo "Stopping NodeBB..."
        cd /home/nodebb/foorum
        ./nodebb stop
        ;;
     *)
        echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/nodebb {start|stop}"
        exit 1
        ;;
 esac

 exit 0

[julian]

Can you try changing ./nodebb start to ./nodebb start --no-daemon?

[markkus]

@julian
Alright, I'll give it a try.

Edit: Tried it & it gives a 502 error instantly.

[julian]

Hm, weird... what's the error shown in the output.log file?

[markkus]

Sorry for bringing up this old post, but I've been struggling with the problem for almost a month now. I've tried many things - rewriting the start script, checking the logs for any error output etc. etc., nothing has helped so far. So I started thinking, that maybe the small amount of RAM is the reason for those unusual ''crashes''. So without doubt, I went for a 1024MB DigitalOcean VPS. And indeed, this improved the situation, however the NodeBB still crashes every now and then, but not on a daily basis anymore.
So I'm thinking that maybe there is a memory allocation problem with NodeBB or just NodeJS? I'm on NodeBB 0.4.3, not on the latest build ofc.

I'll do some tests and write back with some RAM allocation results.

[baris]

Do you have swap enabled on the VPS?

[julian]

Enabling Swap on Digital Ocean

[a_5mith]

@julian Is this something you would recommend doing? My RAM sits at about 73% when NodeBB is running.

[julian]

@a_5mith It's harmless, especially if you're not using all that extra disk space in your droplet.

When we were running this forum on a $5 droplet, we also ran php-fastcgi and mysql. MySQL would run out of memory every couple days because we didn't have swap enabled.

Keep in mind that when Redis holds all of the db information in-memory, it also needs twice that amount when it tries to persist to disk. It makes a copy of the in-memory database, in memory (heh), and then pushes that to the .rdb file.

[markkus]

I activated swap, hope this will do the trick.