[syslog-ng]syslog-ng dying randomly?

[Russo, Ben]

I too had a problem with syslog-ng 1.4.14 dying randomly 
on my RedHat Linux 7.2 box.

I did a number of things and now it runs reliably. 
(at least for the last few weeks it hasn't had any problems)

I don't know what fixed the problem 
but I will tell you what steps I took...

I stoped using v1.4.14  and started using 1.5.17
In the config file options I added the following:
                 time_reap(12);
                 gc_busy_threshold(768);
because in my particular environment I found that 
syslog-ng would have thousands of open files, this fixed 
that and lsof only shows hundreds of open files.

I also started logging to a ReiserFS filesystem rather 
than ext2fs because I found that the directory scan performance 
on ext2fs slows to a crawl if you are constantly adding
and removing files from a directory.  
	(even when the directory was empty it was hundreds of KB)

BTW, you might be interested in this:
    syslog-ng  to SQL database HOWTO 

http://www.umialumni.com/~ben/SYSLOG-DOC.html

-Ben.