We use piwik since 2009 and we are very happy with it, it is an awsome platform, congratulations an thank you for it.
Today we have detected a problem with our installation, since 18 February we have files at our root folder with more or less 250MB.
All files name start with core.* (a number), example: core.2780.
The system is working with no problems or errors reported but we know have 143 files with the core.* and 34GB of disk space occupied for it.
Can you guys help us? What are those files? Can we delete it or are they normal?
Is it related with the auto archive option? (we have about 50 sites, 3 of them no more than 10k visits/day)
I suspect that these are memory dump files. They’re not part of a normal Piwik installation, and are probably created by your operating system (Linux??)
You can safely delete these files, and you should look in your operating system log for hints as to what’s causing the dumps to be created in the first place.
Yes, Linux indeed (totally forgot about core dump files), not sure yet what caused it, the files core.* using strings command to read it said (/usr/bin/php /******/******/public_html/index.php).
Also found some mentions to Zend files like /Db/Table.php0x7fd5ad9604ef but can be nothing.
Restarted apache service and for now tha last core dump file is from yestarday 1 March, if i find something relevant ill post it here.
using command file it gives me: core.10063: ELF 64-bit LSB core file x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), SVR4-style, from ‘/usr/bin/php /******/******/public_html/index.php’
The files still appearing, more often then on weekends which is compreensible since there is a lot of less traffic.
Already tried gdb and the result was:
Core was generated by `/usr/bin/php //*/public_html/index.php’.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault. #0 0x00000000007211c1 in ap_coredump_dir ()
Since the files are only appearing after 17 February I was able to verify that at that day near 8pm the ISP network went down and when got back we had to repair numerous databases from our servers including this one.
Already started the services, the only thing missing is a full restart to the server and see what happens, after that if this pesists i think we cannot do much more for this installation, maybe a new install but we will loose everything.
Ill post anyway the result after the full restart.
We have updated to 2.1 about 4 hours ago and for now we dont have any new core dump file.
For what that matters i’ve said before that i would be restarting the server but since you have suggested the piwik update we have not restarted it just to be sure about the update and not create another variable.
So for now i’ve nothing to report, all seems fine here.