[syslog-ng] Syslog-ng appears to hang for local requests to log

[Geller, Sandor (IT)]

Hello,

> Hi Folks
> 
> We operate a central syslog server for several thousand system on a
> linux box running syslog-ng 2.0rc3.  For some time we have 
> noticed that
> the machine hosting the service slowly locks up and we then have to
> reset the power to restart it.  Recently we significantly 
> increased the
> load on the box and now this is happening about once a week.

2.0rc3 is a very old version. I recommend upgrading to 2.0.5 which
contains a lot of improvements compared to 2.0rc3

> Here are the symptoms we observer:
> 
>    1. service to systems sending logs to the host are not affected. 
>       Logs continue to get written to disk
>    2. Cron jobs hang
>    3. login attempts hang
>    4. as do sudo attempts.
>    5. ssh sessions that were established before things turned 
> to custard
>       are not affected
>    6. top, sar etc.  don't show anything unusual
>    7. ps shows hung cron jobs but nothing else unusual

Interesting... So syslog-ng doesn't hang, however new processes do?
It would be useful to have the strace output of syslog-ng and a
hanging process to see what happens.

Could you check how many file descriptors are in use on your system
when the problem occurs?

Regards,

Sandor
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