Zcatalog clear and rebuild quits plone client without any error

Question

I have a strange problem with one of my plone: when I clear and rebuild the zcatalog the zope client quits silently after some time. No errors.

I did the process using the ZMI (zeo + zeoclient, standalone) and using 'zinstance debug'. Same result the client quits silently.

I'm using a standard Plone 4.3 with some addon Products on a Ubuntu Server 12.04 box.

Tasks I have done in order to find out the problem, without success:

• I've checked the permissions on the filesystem.
• I've reinstalled Plone 4.3
• Packing the database works ok, but the problem persists.
• Checked the free inodes on the filesystem.
• Executing the process on other computer works successfully.
• Executing the client with fg parameter, no messages when quitting.
• Backup the db and restoring. Same result after restoring, but if restoring on other computer the process rebuilds the catalog (with same Plone version and addons).
• Reindexing a index of the catalog causes the same fail: quitting with no messages.
• ZODB/scripts/fstest.py shows no errors.
• ZODB/scripts/fsrefs.py shows no errors.

Any clues?

Answer 1

David, you are right, I just found the problem yesterday, but it was too late (I was tired) to report it here.

This plone instance is installed on an VPS (OpenVZ) with 512 MB and the kernel killed the python process silently when there was no memory free.

One of my last tests was to rebuild the catalog with "log progress" enabled, there I show that the process quitted at different points, but all around 30%. Then by chance I executed dmesg, and "voila", the mistery was resolved, look:

[2233907.698115] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 17819 (python) score 0 vm:799612kB, rss:497324kB, swap:45480kB
[2235168.564053] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 445 (python) score 0 vm:790380kB, rss:498036kB, swap:46924kB
[2236752.744927] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 17964 (python) score 0 vm:790392kB, rss:494232kB, swap:45584kB
[2237461.280724] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 26584 (python) score 0 vm:790328kB, rss:497932kB, swap:45940kB
[2238443.104334] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 1216 (python) score 0 vm:799512kB, rss:494132kB, swap:44632kB
[2239457.938721] Out of memory in UB: OOM killed process 12821 (python) score 0 vm:794896kB, rss:502000kB, swap:42656kB}