Archiving suddenly fails even with 7G memory_limit

Support & Bugs
1

I have a piwik 2.17.1 installation with 3 websites (1 for js tracking, 1 for apache logs, 1 for varnish logs) of average traffic. It has been running for the last 2 years and the mysqldump is 20GB. On that piwik every midnight a script is run to:

  • import apache logs for the day using misc/log-analytics/import_logs.py
  • import varnish logs for the day using misc/log-analytics/import_logs.py
  • archive all sites using console core:archive --url=http://.../index.php

Two weeks ago archiving suddenly started taking a lot of hours and then it failed. In order to debug the problem I copied the piwik files and the database to another machine and started experimenting.

It turns out that the process is always stuck at the period=year of any of the 3 websites. It takes 60 minutes and then fails with:

Response was 'PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 7516192768 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 469110 bytes)`

Yes, that is 7GBs allocated via memory_limit of /etc/php/5.6/cli/php.ini. Note that the production machine just has 2GB allocated and it has been running well so far (until 2 weeks ago).

Do you have any idea why it is stuck? Is there a possibility that I can run some custom sql queries to do some “cleaning” in order for the archiving to continue working? I think that something is wrong because it used to work with 2GBs memory_limit 2 weeks ago but now it can’t get past even with 7GBs.

When it’s stuck the php process is at 100%. Mysql isn’t doing anything important (checked show processlist, the general_log and the slow_query_log). The last query executed before the intense PHP work looks like the following and regards 2016-12:

SELECT value, name, idsite, date1, date2, ts_archived
	FROM piwik_archive_blob_2016_12
	WHERE idarchive IN (8869)
	AND (name = 'Actions_actions_url' OR 
		(name LIKE 'Actions_actions_url%' AND 
			(SUBSTRING(name, 20, 7) = '_chunk_' OR 
				(SUBSTRING(name, 21, 1) >= '0' AND SUBSTRING(name, 21, 1) <= '9')
			)
		)
	);

If I kill the inner php process doing the period=year work, the exception is:

Exception trace:
 () at /web-pub/piwik/core/CronArchive.php:496
 Piwik\CronArchive->logFatalError() at /web-pub/piwik/core/CronArchive.php:489
 Piwik\CronArchive->end() at /web-pub/piwik/core/CronArchive.php:291
 Piwik\CronArchive->Piwik\{closure}() at /web-pub/piwik/core/Access.php:469
 Piwik\Access::doAsSuperUser() at /web-pub/piwik/core/CronArchive.php:292
 Piwik\CronArchive->main() at /web-pub/piwik/plugins/CoreConsole/Commands/CoreArchiver.php:27
 Piwik\Plugins\CoreConsole\Commands\CoreArchiver->execute() at /web-pub/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Command/Command.php:257
 Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command->run() at /web-pub/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:874
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRunCommand() at /web-pub/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:195
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRun() at n/a:n/a
 call_user_func() at /web-pub/piwik/core/Console.php:79
 Piwik\Console->Piwik\{closure}() at /web-pub/piwik/core/Access.php:469
 Piwik\Access::doAsSuperUser() at /web-pub/piwik/core/Console.php:80
 Piwik\Console->doRun() at /web-pub/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:126
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->run() at /web-pub/piwik/console:27
2

Which php version are you using? try upgrade to php7+ which could help. Also upgrading to Piwik 3.0.0 would help the memory usage.

3

Thanks for the response. It’s php 5.5 and php 5.6 (tried with both) and I plan to upgrade to php 7.

I’ll also upgrade to piwik 3 after I get past this problem.

I was just thinking whether there is an explanation or some sort of debugging I could do to identify why archiving stopped being able to complete.

4

Hi ,

I do have same problem and using piwik 2.10.0 and php 5.5.21 .

Kind Regards,
Saqib

5

Please upgrade to Piwik 3.0.1

6

Thanks for your suggestion and yeah we will update , though I have not seen any ticket closed related to this issue .

7

Also upgrade to PHP7