Backups frequently crashing lately - "reason":"Internal Error"

[d19dotca]

Side note: Just so I'm sure of what's going on, I noticed when I start a backup process (just testing right now), I see the root node service go crazy high in memory but sporadically, it keeps changing from around 300 MB in physical memory to just under 900 MB in physical memory. This is because of the backup process, right?

top - 16:08:33 up  9:42,  1 user,  load average: 2.65, 2.07, 1.66
Tasks: 597 total,   1 running, 596 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.7 us,  6.1 sy, 32.5 ni, 59.1 id,  0.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.3 si,  0.1 st
MiB Mem :   7961.9 total,    124.0 free,   5531.6 used,   2306.2 buff/cache
MiB Swap:    981.0 total,    228.0 free,    753.0 used.    956.4 avail Mem 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND             
 823023 root      35  15 1737404 893500  24260 S 118.3  11.0   1:41.76 node               
  12397 107       20   0 2102888 696664  12424 S   0.3   8.5   9:49.96 mysqld              
  16340 yellowt+  20   0 1129500 255608   3544 S   0.0   3.1   0:16.42 ruby2.7             
  16339 yellowt+  20   0 1129500 253392   7048 S   0.0   3.1   0:14.00 ruby2.7             
  15539 yellowt+  20   0  407068 185000   4676 S   0.0   2.3   0:37.64 ruby2.7             
  15538 yellowt+  20   0  453524 177680   5332 S   0.0   2.2   0:07.70 ruby2.7             
    741 mysql     20   0 2092024 130360   5316 S   0.3   1.6   3:03.02 mysqld              
  16575 yellowt+  20   0   10.9g 109224  11820 S   0.0   1.3   0:50.66 node         

[nebulon]

Can you check how much memory you are giving the backup task? This is in advanced settings of the backup configuration.

The default would be 400Mb and it will use that amount, since there a fair amount of data piping happening, especially if disk and network I/O are good.

[d19dotca]

@nebulon said in Backups frequently crashing lately - "reason":"Internal Error":

The default would be 400Mb and it will use that amount, since there a fair amount of data piping happening, especially if disk and network I/O are good.

Well since I thought it was the memory for the backup task initially which has been an issue in the past for many users, I had increased it to 6 GB of memory (which is admittedly a lot on an 8 GB server), but I had it initially at 4 GB when I was seeing the issue. I've had it at 4 GB for many months though. I've lowered it to 2 GB for the moment to test and see if that helps at all, but I'm worried the trigger was mysqldump commands and I'm not sure if the backup task memory would impact that at all.

This is the current configuration as of this morning for troubleshooting purposes:

[d19dotca]

Just encountered the issue again.

Here are the latest logs:

Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: redis-server invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x100cca(GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE), order=0, oom_score_adj=0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: CPU: 1 PID: 6436 Comm: redis-server Not tainted 5.4.0-74-generic #83-Ubuntu
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Hardware name: Vultr HFC, BIOS  
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Call Trace:
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  dump_stack+0x6d/0x8b
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  dump_header+0x4f/0x1eb
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  oom_kill_process.cold+0xb/0x10
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  out_of_memory.part.0+0x1df/0x3d0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  out_of_memory+0x6d/0xd0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __alloc_pages_slowpath+0xd5e/0xe50
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x2d0/0x320
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  alloc_pages_current+0x87/0xe0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __page_cache_alloc+0x72/0x90
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  pagecache_get_page+0xbf/0x300
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  filemap_fault+0x6b2/0xa50
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ? unlock_page_memcg+0x12/0x20
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ? page_add_file_rmap+0xff/0x1a0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ? xas_load+0xd/0x80
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ? xas_find+0x17f/0x1c0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ? filemap_map_pages+0x24c/0x380
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  ext4_filemap_fault+0x32/0x50
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __do_fault+0x3c/0x130
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  do_fault+0x24b/0x640
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __handle_mm_fault+0x4c5/0x7a0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  handle_mm_fault+0xca/0x200
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  do_user_addr_fault+0x1f9/0x450
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  __do_page_fault+0x58/0x90
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  do_page_fault+0x2c/0xe0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  do_async_page_fault+0x39/0x70
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel:  async_page_fault+0x34/0x40
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: RIP: 0033:0x5642ded5def4
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Code: Bad RIP value.
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: RSP: 002b:00007ffe39d1f480 EFLAGS: 00010293
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: RAX: 0000000000000001 RBX: 0000000000000000 RCX: 00005642dedb5a14
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: RDX: 0000000000000001 RSI: 00007f6c13408823 RDI: 0000000000000002
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 00007ffe39d1f3d8
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: R10: 00007ffe39d1f3d0 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 00007ffe39d1f648
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: R13: 0000000000000002 R14: 00007f6c1341f020 R15: 0000000000000000
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Mem-Info:
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: active_anon:961079 inactive_anon:871527 isolated_anon:0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 active_anon:3844316kB inactive_anon:3486108kB active_file:624kB inactive_file:464kB unevictable:18540kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):20kB mapped:900656kB dirty:0kB writeback:0kB shmem:1207700kB shmem_thp: 0kB shmem_pmdmapped: 0kB anon_thp: 0kB writeback_tmp:0kB unstable:0kB all_unreclaimable? no
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 DMA free:15900kB min:132kB low:164kB high:196kB active_anon:0kB inactive_anon:0kB active_file:0kB inactive_file:0kB unevictable:0kB writepending:0kB present:15992kB managed:15908kB mlocked:0kB kernel_stack:0kB pagetables:0kB bounce:0kB free_pcp:0kB local_pcp:0kB free_cma:0kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 2911 7858 7858 7858
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 DMA32 free:44284kB min:24988kB low:31232kB high:37476kB active_anon:1420788kB inactive_anon:1398328kB active_file:0kB inactive_file:360kB unevictable:0kB writepending:0kB present:3129200kB managed:3063664kB mlocked:0kB kernel_stack:9504kB pagetables:29712kB bounce:0kB free_pcp:1560kB local_pcp:540kB free_cma:0kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 4946 4946 4946
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 Normal free:42004kB min:42460kB low:53072kB high:63684kB active_anon:2423528kB inactive_anon:2087780kB active_file:588kB inactive_file:808kB unevictable:18540kB writepending:0kB present:5242880kB managed:5073392kB mlocked:18540kB kernel_stack:29040kB pagetables:53096kB bounce:0kB free_pcp:3512kB local_pcp:676kB free_cma:0kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0 0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 DMA: 1*4kB (U) 1*8kB (U) 1*16kB (U) 0*32kB 2*64kB (U) 1*128kB (U) 1*256kB (U) 0*512kB 1*1024kB (U) 1*2048kB (M) 3*4096kB (M) = 15900kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 DMA32: 3172*4kB (UME) 1384*8kB (UE) 744*16kB (UME) 242*32kB (UME) 15*64kB (UME) 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 44368kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 Normal: 157*4kB (UME) 2012*8kB (UMEH) 976*16kB (UMEH) 291*32kB (UME) 4*64kB (M) 2*128kB (M) 1*256kB (M) 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 42420kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Node 0 hugepages_total=0 hugepages_free=0 hugepages_surp=0 hugepages_size=2048kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 337832 total pagecache pages
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 33532 pages in swap cache
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Swap cache stats: add 413059, delete 379528, find 3909879/3976154
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Free swap  = 0kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Total swap = 1004540kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 2097018 pages RAM
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 0 pages HighMem/MovableOnly
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 58777 pages reserved
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 0 pages cma reserved
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: 0 pages hwpoisoned
[...]
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=ac3d3b89315a33f079b879cebf2fa7d68e0512640f9a7ab16e1b9c79b192fa1b,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/system.slice/box-task-10731.service,task=node,pid=1757378,uid=0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 1757378 (node) total-vm:2615204kB, anon-rss:1725444kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:0 pgtables:8244kB oom_score_adj:0
Jun 17 03:13:17 my kernel: oom_reaper: reaped process 1757378 (node), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB
Jun 17 03:13:17 my sudo[1757377]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
Jun 17 03:13:17 my systemd[1]: box-task-10731.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=50/n/a
Jun 17 03:13:17 my systemd[1]: box-task-10731.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

This time it wasn't MySQL but was redis apparently?

The system memory output is below too:

free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          7.8Gi       4.5Gi       237Mi       1.2Gi       3.1Gi       1.8Gi
Swap:         980Mi       969Mi        11Mi

[nebulon]

@d19dotca as mentioned, I think the only option for now is to either increase "physical" memory on the server or decrease the memory limit for the backup task. Also I guess from your screenshot you might want to decrease part-size, since from your memory paste and part size of 256MB, a single part, loaded into memory, would force the server to kill something to free up some memory.

Of course decreasing part-size usually means slower backups or if you have huge files, some object storages will hit part-number limits then...

[d19dotca]

@nebulon Okay, I've further lowered the backup config and will hope that works for now. I just don't quite get why memory is an issue when my server never seems to go much beyond 5 GB used out of 8 GB. Nothing really changed outside of moving to Vultr, and even then that was about 1.5 months ago and this issue only started in the past week or so.

[nebulon]

@d19dotca but your screenpastes do show the server getting low on memory 237Mi free is quite low given your part-size setting. Whatever shared/buff/availalbe is shown there, if the kernel decides to kill a task means those other bits are deemed more important and can't be freed up.
Especially during backup the system I/O will use quite a bit of memory for buffering.

I acknowledge that this is not ideal to keep such a large amount of memory around just for the backup task, so I think the alternative is to restrict the backup task heavily and keep backup objects small (meaning maybe not using tarball strategy if you do). The tradeoff will be slower backups though.

[d19dotca]

@nebulon Okay I've not had a backup crash in the last two days approximately now since severely limiting the backup memory from what it used to be. I still don't understand why it's suddenly crashing when it's been configured this way for so long now and only started recently happening with no new apps or memory changes (that I'm aware of anyways), but I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks for the help Nebulon, looks like limiting the backup memory is working for now.

[d19dotca]

Hi @nebulon - I see recently that there are a few puma: cluster worker commands being run which seem to be taking up a decent chunk of memory... any ideas if this is Cloudron-related? I haven't noticed puma before. Wondering if this is related to the memory issues I've been having recently too.

ubuntu@my:~$ ps aux --sort -rss | head
USER         PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
uuidd      10044  4.4  2.0 2617076 300100 ?      Sl   09:13   0:22 /usr/sbin/mysqld
ubuntu     13987  0.3  1.8 1129480 279584 pts/0  Sl   09:14   0:01 puma: cluster worker 1: 17 [code]
ubuntu     13982  0.2  1.6 1129480 253660 pts/0  Sl   09:14   0:00 puma: cluster worker 0: 17 [code]
ubuntu     13717  2.6  1.6 406624 251220 pts/0   Sl   09:14   0:11 sidekiq 6.2.1 code [0 of 2 busy]
ubuntu     13716  2.2  1.6 453504 243064 pts/0   Sl   09:14   0:09 puma 5.3.2 (tcp://127.0.0.1:3000) [code]
yellowt+   11728  1.9  1.1 1592140 177712 pts/0  Sl   09:13   0:09 /home/git/gitea/gitea web -c /run/gitea/app.ini -p 3000
mysql        834  1.0  1.0 2482488 161512 ?      Ssl  09:12   0:05 /usr/sbin/mysqld
root         845  2.5  0.8 3316204 132860 ?      Ssl  09:12   0:13 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --log-driver=journald --exec-opt native.cgroupdriver=cgroupfs --storage-driver=overlay2
ubuntu     14525  1.4  0.8 11457536 122692 pts/0 Sl+  09:14   0:05 /usr/local/node-14.15.4/bin/node /app/code/app.js

---

Edit: I believe I've confirmed now that the puma and sidekiq commands/services are related to Mastodon. When I stop Mastodon, those services go away too.

I realized this issue started happening right around the time of the latest Mastodon update which was ~17 days ago. Now I'm starting to wonder if this latest 1.6.2 version release is related... https://forum.cloudron.io/post/32335

[nebulon]

@d19dotca if it aligns time-wise this is quite possible. Maybe mastodon has memory spikes as well which could align with the memory requirement of the backup process then. Not sure what could be done though, if the memory is indeed used for backups and the app components.

[d19dotca]

@nebulon So I stopped the Mastodon app, and things seem a bit better but I find the memory still runs low, it's only a matter of maybe 12 hours and the free memory is less than 300 MB. I don't think that used to be the case. You mentioning that the free memory was low got me intrigued as to what was taking up the memory. With all apps and services running except for Mastodon, and soon after a reboot, the following is the memory usage by service:

ubuntu@my:~$ ps axo rss,comm,pid | awk '{ proc_list[$2] += $1; } END \
{ for (proc in proc_list) { printf("%d\t%s\n", proc_list[proc],proc); }}' | sort -n | tail -n 20 | sort -rn | awk '{$1/=1024;printf "%.0fMB\t",$1}{print $2}'
3942MB	/usr/sbin/apach
1769MB	node
1030MB	ruby2.7
717MB	supervisord
511MB	mysqld
468MB	containerd-shim
263MB	spamd
220MB	redis-server
207MB	postmaster
164MB	nginx
132MB	dockerd
114MB	mongod
94MB	uwsgi
59MB	containerd
57MB	systemd-udevd
38MB	carbon-cache
35MB	snapd
35MB	imap
34MB	pidproxy
33MB	radicale

Is the memory usage for node sounding about right with it being under 2 GB? Do you have any concerns with the memory usage above as the top 20 memory-consuming tasks?

For context, after a reboot, my server memory is as follows (I'll update tomorrow morning/afternoon when it's low again):

ubuntu@my:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           14Gi       4.0Gi       4.8Gi       449Mi       5.5Gi       9.6Gi
Swap:         4.0Gi          0B       4.0Gi

[nebulon]

@d19dotca my shell foo is not that great, but is it possible that your listing would combine all processes with the same name? If that is the case then maybe this is ok, otherwise I wonder which is that single node process and also that single supervisord should hardly take up that much.

[d19dotca]

@nebulon Oh sorry, yes that was a command I found online which I thought was neat, haha. It just combines processes with the same name which I think is useful at times, so it's basically a summary of all MySQL services, all Node servers, etc.

Thanks for the assistance by the way - I know I'm deviating a bit from the original concern so that's okay - we can probably mark this resolved now since limiting the backup task memory was sufficient for now. It just has me wondering about memory usage overall on my system now. haha. I'll maybe file a new post if I need a bit more insight later to memory stuff. Thanks again for the help!

For reference, here is the current status of those commands:

ubuntu@my:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           14Gi       5.3Gi       797Mi       925Mi       8.2Gi       7.8Gi
Swap:         4.0Gi       3.0Mi       4.0Gi

(there was 2.2 GB free when I woke up this morning but little left now because it just completed a backup, so hoping that memory gets put back - but wondering if maybe this is why it's going to low in "free" memory (even though plenty left in "available" memory).

ubuntu@my:~$ ps axo rss,comm,pid | awk '{ proc_list[$2] += $1; } END \
> { for (proc in proc_list) { printf("%d\t%s\n", proc_list[proc],proc); }}' | sort -n | tail -n 20 | sort -rn | awk '{$1/=1024;printf "%.0fMB\t",$1}{print $2}'
5793MB	/usr/sbin/apach
1958MB	node
1070MB	ruby2.7
903MB	mysqld
716MB	supervisord
476MB	containerd-shim
327MB	spamd
236MB	redis-server
179MB	postmaster
170MB	nginx
139MB	mongod
133MB	dockerd
121MB	uwsgi
81MB	imap
65MB	systemd-udevd
61MB	containerd
59MB	imap-login
44MB	radicale
39MB	carbon-cache
36MB	snapd

Definitely a lot more Apache-related memory usage (which I guess is just all the containers running Apache like all the WordPress sites for example and makes sense as most of the apps running are WordPress apps in Cloudron). MySQL memory also almost doubled, but since so many are WordPress sites and if they're getting busier I suspect that means more MySQL usage which means MySQL will use more memory, so I think that all checks out still.

One thing I'm not sure I fully understand yet (but maybe this is a bit outside the scope of Cloudron) is the memory part... so last night I had 4.0 GB used and 4.8 GB in the free column, now it's 5.3 GB used but the free memory dropped by about 4 GB to 797 MB from 4.8 GB last night. That's where I get a bit confused and unsure why that goes so low when the memory usage only went up a bit. I believe it basically becomes "reserved" and then used in the "buff/cache" and when no longer used it's still reserved so becomes "available", is that right do you think?