"Waiting for unicorn to reload", then update stops

What are the hardware specs? Is it heavily memory constrained, or are the disks slow (not SSD)?

It’s not a problem to update via SSH command line if that works better, but it shouldn’t be required.

I’m not sure what the criteria is for constrained, the site has been relatively speedy (with no cloudflare, CDN or other tricks). It’s a KVM VM with 2GB. Here is an output from free:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        2047876     1263844      121092      280544      662940      325164
Swap:       2097148      549032     1548116

There is nothing else running on this but Discourse. However, the disks are definitely slow, non-SSD, in RAID-10, and shared with a few other VMs. I raniotop as the nightly backup was going and didn’t see anything above 50MBps.

The exported non-compressed backup .sql is ~600MB, average daily engaged this past month <50, and daily pageviews are <6000 per day.

I do see one major difference in the output between what you posted originally and what @danekhollas and I are getting. In our output, it takes Unicorn significantly longer to reload (based on the number of dots), however it’s always been that way since that was added to the upgrade process.

The swap usage is fairly high there. This implies you have a busy instance. Also, slow disks are going to be quite painful in several dimensions.

1 Like

In my case I have SSD and plenty RAM, but CPU is slow (1.7 GHz) and I usually have only around 7Gb free space on HDD. I noticed that Discourse seems to want at least 5Gb free during upgrade, could this be the issue?

Note that this problem started happening at a specific point in time (probably around this topic got started but I am not sure) and since then I was not able to upgrade via UI at all, which lead me to believe that something must have changed…

I gave @tgxworld access to my instance in case it is helpful.

Note tgx is out for a bit, he may have a chance to have a quick look next week.

4 Likes

This also just happened to me, however it looks like the Docker Manager upgrade actually worked:

1 Like

Just to update since my last post ~4 months ago. I took the advice given and moved over to a whole new machine, with a significant RAM+CPU increase and switch to full SSD. This problem has not occurred again.

5 Likes

I am also facing this issue in the last several times I have tried to upgrade using the web UI.

My instance is hosted on a VM that is configurable to higher specs if I request it, but it’s not clear to me what are the recommended specs for running a typical Discourse instance.

Can someone provide these specs?

The above question is assuming the upgrade failure only happens because of lack of resources on the host.

Need help, getting error while upgarding docker_manager
Sorry, there was an error upgrading Discourse. Please check the logs below.
Its the same error
Spinning up 1 Unicorn worker(s) that were stopped initially
It is Remote Version: 2c89085
I have the option to Reset Upgrade, Should I do that? Kindly assist me. Advance thanks!!

This is just to report that I had this problem for the first time with upgrade v2.4.0.beta10 +1 (“docker_manager 2c89085 Up to date”) via the web UI. If anyone needs my log, see attachment. Discourse2.4beta10error.txt (10.2 KB)

./launcher rebuild app worked fine.

It happened on my test system, self-hosted at home. Intel Atom D525 1,8 Ghz 2 cores / 4 threads with 4 GB and SSD running Lubuntu 16.04 LTS. Just Docker/Discourse, no other tasks.

1 Like

This problem just occurred to me when I tried to update 2.7.4

I tried rebuilding via command line but got an error that with the following error (after I ran discourse-doctor)

FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: cd /var/www/discourse && su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake themes:update assets:precompile' failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 4115 exit 1>
Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:112:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params {"cd"=>"$home", "hook"=>"assets_precompile", "cmd"=>["su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake themes:update assets:precompile'"]}
5b36313b3f2b9e2173d52f8a7519d6aba3c4a975182d80150776d9c83659c351
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.
==================== END REBUILD LOG ====================
Failed to rebuild app.

Now it is strange that the new version 2.7.4 is shown and when I tried to update a theme component I got “about.json contains invalid values: Maximum discourse version is invalid”

Has somebody a recommendation on how to bring discourse in a valid state again?