[chef] os_process_error in CouchDB

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We are seeing a strange error in CouchDB that causes Chef to become unusable and unrecoverable. The knife command ceases to respond, and the chef webui ceases to respond. /var/log/couch.log shows an os_process_error with exit status 0.

This is the second time this has happened. The first time, it happened to our chef-server that was running properly for several weeks. On Monday, at about 11 AM EST, the error occurred and our chef-server became urecoverable. We tried to research and recover the issue for about a day.

We then rebuilt the chef-server this morning. During the setup/installation, we encountered this issue (http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2346) which we had encountered in the past. We then applied the fix, by increasing maxFieldLength in the mainIndex section of the chef solr config file.

Very shortly after that, while do a chef run on a lab node, running a knife command and trying to access the web UI all at the same time, the os_process_error occurred again and the chef-server became unusable.

Our chef-server is running on a vSphere VM with 2 cores (2 cores in 1 socket), 2GB of RAM. It's running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Chef 0.10.8 and CouchDB 0.10. The VM was generated from a pre-existing VM that originally had only 1 core.

Another detail about our environment that may be important is that we use Centrify on our Linux server for Active Directory integration. This is why we were affected by CHEF-2346. Since chef pulls in all authorized users on a node as an automatic attribute, there can be thousands of users in a list that gets gathered by chef.

Is perhaps CouchDB dying because of the size of the node data that we are asking chef to gather? Has anyone else encountered this error? Much thanks for any help. Let me know if I can provide any more information.

Ian D. Rossi