Answered my own question.

The short version is that the PIPE signals were caused by too many RSS 
requests. BackupPC daemon talks to the CGI scripts through a socket. When the 
socket get's too much traffic it throws SIG PIPE and the BackupPC daemon exits.

My windows clients run a script that polls the backup status through RSS and 
displays a color coded notification icon. I couldn't easily change all of the 
windows machines to poll less so I changed the RSS code so that it serves a 
cached copy of the RSS xml from a file, which gets refreshed once an hour. 
Serving the cached file happens without opening the socket connection. Since 
starting the new RSS code the BackupPC daemon has been up for over 24 hours, 
which is a big improvement over the crashing every 1 to 5 hours before.

RP

________________________________________
From: Russell R Poyner <russell.poyner AT wisc DOT edu>
Sent: Monday, February 1, 2016 11:02 AM
To: General list for user discussion, questions and support
Subject: [BackupPC-users] BackupPC daemon crashes often

I have a BackupPC server running in a jail on FreeBSD 10. The system
mostly works, but recently I've noticed that the BackupPC parent process
is frequently needing to be restarted. I even went to the length of
having a cron job that checks for the existence of the 'BackupPC -d'
process and restarts BackupPC if it's missing.


Examining the logs shows the daemon exiting with:
Got signal PIPE... cleaning up

each time.

Has anyone seen this sort of thing, or perhaps have ideas on how I can
debug it? Finding the PID of the process than sent the signal is not
easy in Perl, but maybe there is some other approach?

Thanks
Russ Poyner

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