At the moment we don’t have any idea why. As I am in Italy right now I will investigate this after my return home in the middle of the week. Please stay tuned.

Is anybody aware of any current exploits for ejabberd?

Due to until now unknown reasons the server which holds the Jabber services crashed four times in the last not even two hours. From one second to the other the ejabberd processes took every resource they could get, and even more. 8 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of swap, everything gone. Plus a lot of CPU load. The machine was loaded that “top” refreshed just every 5 minutes and in the end just a hardware reset helped to reboot the machine.

For the tech geeks:

top – 19:56:21 up 31 min,  1 user,  load average: 22.86, 13.11, 8.71
Tasks: 240 total,   3 running, 231 sleeping,   0 stopped,   6 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.4%us,  5.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 12.4%id, 80.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8190900k total,  8138972k used,    51928k free,      796k buffers
Swap:  8393848k total,  7276916k used,  1116932k free,    42404k cached

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
3239 ejabberd  20   0 15.7g 6.0g 460 S   23 76.7   3:06.65 beam.smp

We are looking into this issue. Maybe a severe bug with ejabberd, maybe a DoS attack. We don’t know, yet.