Apache – (28)No space left on device: Cannot create SSLMutex

Yesterday, I experienced very strange problem, that comes first time (for me), so checked things with apache and modules as diff way, but at the end got it fixed with the help of apache wiki 🙂  Thanks to make it perfect !!

There was something bad going with the apache and I was trying to fix it, as I need to restart it to first fix, but It can’t started, just popup message “[FAILED]”, surprised, ran twice to start it, then checked the error logs for debugging it and found the new error logged into messages.

[Thu Mar 10 00:58:59 2011] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Thu Mar 10 00:58:59 2011] [error] (28)No space left on device: Cannot create SSLMutex
Configuration Failed

I found the page where all the related errors are listed by Apache http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/Logs , this helps me to fix this error.

“This error indicates that the server has run out of available slots for “inter-process communication“. This can occur when a process crashes before cleaning up after itself.The ipcs command will list semaphores and shared memory slots in use. If there is a large number of entries in use by the apache user use ipcrm to remove them. Then, check your server’s error log (possibly with LogLevel debug set) to figure out why it’s crashing, or see: http://httpd.apache.org/dev/debugging.html”

[root@testbed ~]# ipcs -s |grep apacheuser
—— Semaphore Arrays ——–
key        semid      owner      perms      nsems
0x00000000 26836992   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 26902529   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 26935298   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 27361283   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 27426820   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 27459589   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 22937608   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 23003145   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 23035914   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 33456140   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 34308109   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 34340878   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 48791567   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 49053712   apacheuser 600        1
0x00000000 49086481   apacheuser 600        1

[root@testbed ~]# ipcs -s |grep apacheuser | awk ‘{print $2}’
26836992
26902529
26935298
27361283
27426820
27459589
22937608
23003145
23035914
33456140
34308109
34340878
48791567
49053712
49086481

[root@testbed ~]# ipcs -s |grep apacheuser | awk ‘{print $2}’| xargs ipcrm sem
resource(s) deleted

[root@testbed ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd start
Starting httpd:                                            [  OK  ]

Ref:
http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/Logs
http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/IPCExhaustion

-Ravi

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