Rocketchat-server crashes ("double free" error) occasionally on Ubuntu as a snap

#1

We are running into problems with RocketChat server running as a snap.

Three-to-four times a day it crashes and restarts itself. According to the logs, the culprit is:
Apr 20 08:41:41 sh-rocket-chat rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server[67032]: *** Error in node: double free or corruption (fasttop)

Sadly, logs doesn’t seem to contain anything more relevant - it is followed by aborting the process, holdover time, restarting etc.

We’re having a load of around 100 active users which are sending few thousands of messages per day.
RocketChat is running version 0.63.0 and is installed on clean Ubuntu 16.04 at the cloud. I checked that there is node 8.9.4 in the snap. Disk and memory looks fine.

Anybody here ran into this kind of issue?

#2

This is a new one to me. But a quick Google shows that its not an uncommon error. Sadly… i’m not seeing any real solutions to it, most are issues i’m finding on other repositories that have not been resolved.

If i’m taking a complete stab in the dark… 100 concurrent and thousands of messages a day… It may be overloading Node.js’s single thread. If this is case the easiest way to relieve that kind of pressure is to load balance between a couple of instances of Rocket.Chat. Some usage patterns unfortunately are better suited for multiple threads.

#3

@aaron.ogle

Thank you for the response. We’ve updated the server to 0.63.3, and - despite nothing relevant is in the changelog - it seems to work correctly for now. We will update you if error will continue to occur.

#4

Perfect :slight_smile: