[Koha] Out of memory when Koha starts due to opac-search.pl and 500.pl

[Katrin Fischer]

Hi Mike,

it might be that you are hit by a bad crawler/bot and need to block
access for them in your firewall. There are some that ignore the
robots.txt and they can bring down a Koha server.

I you look at the Apache access logs you might see that all those
requests come from the same IP address.

Hope this helps,

Katrin

On 10.07.24 13:02, Mike Lake wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'm having serious problems with my Koha instance. It serves the OPAC
> for the Australian Speleological Federation.  We are currently on Koha
> 23.11 on a Debian 10.13. The system has been running fine for ages.
>
> I was getting errors from the OOM killer:
>
> oom_reaper: reaped process 1554 (opac-search.pl), now anon-rss:0kB,
> file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB
> opac-search.pl invoked oom-killer:
> gfp_mask=0x6200ca(GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE), nodemask=(null), order=0,
> oom_score_adj=0
> opac-search.pl cpuset=/ mems_allowed=0
>
> So I shutdown Koha (took a while as I was out of memory)
> systemctl stop koha-common.service
>
> Rebooted the machine and when i bought Koha up:
> systemctl start koha-common.service
> Now I'm still getting 96 processes & errors taking all CPU and memory:
>
> 3620  R  /usr/bin/perl
> /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/opac-imageviewer.pl
> 3622  R  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/errors/500.pl
> 3624  R  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/errors/500.pl
> 3625  D  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/opac-search.pl
> 3627  R  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/errors/500.pl
> 3629  D  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/opac-search.pl
> 3630  R  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/errors/500.pl
> 3633  D  /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/koha/opac/cgi-bin/opac/errors/500.pl
>
> Actually its 96 x opac-search.pl + 57 x 500.pl
>
> A reboot does not help. Every time I start Koha those processes appear
> and take all cores and memory.
>
> I do see that the MariaDB is down. "Failed to start MariaDB 10.3.39
> database server."
> Attempts to start it: systemctl start mariadb.service
> give that error probably because I'm out of memory does to the 100
> perl processes running.
>
> A "systemctl stop koha-common.service" does not stop or end those
> opac-search.pl or 500.pl processes.
>
> The /var/log/koha/opac/opac-error.log says:
>
> [cgi:error] [pid 6911] [client 124.243.148.74:47310] End of script
> output before headers: 500.pl
> [cgi:error] [pid 6959] [client 190.92.216.104:41580] End of script
> output before headers: opac-search.pl
>
> Something is borked :-(   Help most welcome.
>