# Chef-server becoming nonresponsive

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-server-becoming-nonresponsive/2558>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [March 15, 2012, 3:46pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-server-becoming-nonresponsive/2558 "2012-03-15T15:46:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Van\_Fossan\_Randy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/8797f3/32.png) [@Van\_Fossan\_Randy](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Van_Fossan_Randy)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2012, 3:46pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-server-becoming-nonresponsive/2558/1 "2012-03-15T15:46:42Z")

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On our chef-server, I notice it seems to hang multiple times a day.  
Clients timeout periodically, knife commands timeout and the webui is  
inaccessible. Sometimes, it will come back on it’s own, sometimes I  
have to shutdown and restart all the chef services. I have been  
looking through the log and thus far haven’t been able to determine a  
cause.

I am compacting the database every day or so. (I have to shutdown the  
chef server to run the compaction otherwise couchdb will sometimes  
crash.

Anyone have any ideas as to what / where I should be looking? We only  
have about 100 nodes, 50+ cookbooks and 20 or so roles…

Our current server is running centos 5.7, couchdb 0.11.2,  
rabbitmq-server 2.2.0, ruby 1.8.7, gems 1.8.10 and chef-server 0.10.8.  
I have built a newer server, but haven’t had the time to migrate.

Thanks  
Randy

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Idrossi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecae2f/32.png) [@Idrossi](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Idrossi)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2012, 5:10pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-server-becoming-nonresponsive/2558/2 "2012-03-15T17:10:44Z")

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What OS are you running? We noticed problems with CouchDB 0.10.x that we’re still trying to understand. But we installed Chef on Ubuntu 11.10, which includes CouchDB 1.0.1 and we haven’t seen the issue. Don’t know if that helps.

Ian D. Rossi

* * *

From: Van Fossan,Randy [vanfossr@oclc.org]  
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:46 AM  
To: [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
Subject: [chef] chef-server becoming nonresponsive

On our chef-server, I notice it seems to hang multiple times a day.  
Clients timeout periodically, knife commands timeout and the webui is  
inaccessible. Sometimes, it will come back on it’s own, sometimes I  
have to shutdown and restart all the chef services. I have been  
looking through the log and thus far haven’t been able to determine a  
cause.

I am compacting the database every day or so. (I have to shutdown the  
chef server to run the compaction otherwise couchdb will sometimes  
crash.

Anyone have any ideas as to what / where I should be looking? We only  
have about 100 nodes, 50+ cookbooks and 20 or so roles…

Our current server is running centos 5.7, couchdb 0.11.2,  
rabbitmq-server 2.2.0, ruby 1.8.7, gems 1.8.10 and chef-server 0.10.8.  
I have built a newer server, but haven’t had the time to migrate.

Thanks  
Randy