Let me start with, that I am running Raspberry Pi servers since the first Raspberry Pi was released more than a decade ago. Only problems I ever had until now, where dying SD-Cards with the first generation of RPIs. Since them I only buy really big high quality SD-Cards and I have RPI(4) servers running 24/7 for years w/o any troubles.
For a new project, I am running a web service on a Raspberry Pi ZeroW2 with an Apache reverse proxy on the same machine. Memory usage, even under load, is a maximum of 100 MB. This RPIZW2 simply dies after a few days, and I have no idea how debug this problem.
More details of the RPIZW2:
- Uses Raspbian configured via Ansible to be an exact replica of my RPI(4), only Apache and a webservice were added
- Quality power supply (original RPI hardware) and literally plugged to the same electricity circuit as the RPI(4)
- The webapp is just a ‘hello, world’ with the current time and my internet connection is not fast enough to be DOSed
- Monitored memory usage etc. for several hours and found nothing out of the ordinary
- fail2bann is active and running
- SD-card has several unused GIGs of free space and is same brand/quality as the one in the RPI(4)
Anyone experienced something similar? Has anyone an idea how to approach debugging this problem?
I am not sure that there is a better place at Lemmy for this kind of question than here. I’ll happily move this post to another place, if it is not appropriate here.
Try a different power supply
I’ve owned and deployed a lot of pi, every model, and in my experience when I have similar instability as you described its related to the sdcard. Either the sdcard itself or the tray soldered to the pi. I had one pi that would corrupt the sdcard without fail after 2 months and I played with bending the sdcard metal tray inward a little to help press the card better into the contacts and the problem went away. Try fiddling with the sdcard holder or different sdcards.
Thank you for the tip, I’ll check it out, if the Pi runs unstable again. Just surprised, it sounds that it happened often to you… Since I upgraded to better sd-cards, I never had sd-card trouble again for nearly a decade now. (And I am constantly running multiple Pis 24/7 as servers)
Have you checked the logs in /var/logs?
dmesg and journalctl -k, found only entries after reboot, that the shutdown was not clean. Any specific logs where I could find more?
Unless the info is out of date (which is likely) kern.log syslog or messeges.
Thanks. I could neither find a file /var/log/kern.log nor did find /var/log | grep -i mess have a match.
I have a pi 4 server that hangs up after a few days. Tried to track down what was causing it but didn’t go to extremes. Most expedient solution was to force a reboot.
Have a cron job that reboots the pi at 3:00 AM each day. Easy work around, lazy was better.
The issue is that it is simply not built with reliability as a high priority so probably some hardware component shits itself too much after a while.There is a reason every reasonable company that needs a server to run reliably in production uses something orders of magnitude more expensive than a rpi.
You lucked out with your previous experiences, but many others did not, or the industry would not pay the price of a rpi a month to run a machine with the specs of a rpi.
That said, if you don’t need the reliability some easy hacks like a reboot cronjob or systemd timer, or trying to turn off unneeded services or peripherals could give you 90% of an industrial server’s reliability
