Drupal and godaddy.com

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Drupal and godaddy.com

Over at consumerist is some bad press on Drupal

GoDaddy demanded $6,579 from Adam Fendelman after his disk usage skyrocketed to over 250 GB without warning, vastly exceeding his account's 150 GB allowance. GoDaddy's security department launched a "full-scale investigation" and quickly determined that Adam was responsible for both the data binge and the extraordinary bill. Adam refused to let the matter drop...

The massive data splurge was apparently caused by a bug in the widely-used open source website management software Drupal, which, like a cancerous tumor, was unstoppably copying thousands of temporary files into Adam's account.

Short story: someone used lots of local disk space on godaddy's hosting service caused by a bug in Drupal? Apart from the fact that GoDaddy should have set a quota, should have had procedures and transparent billing / monitoring mechanisms, Drupal a "cancerous tumour"?

Anyone knows what was happening here? Is GoDaddy blaming Drupal and why? Core? Module? I sure as hell /never/ saw Drupal eat 250GB harddisk space and I would like to know what was happening and if it has nothing to do with Drupal- as would be the case I think- that this news should be corrected ASAP.

BTW: 100GB of storage is 6.000 Dollar over at GoDaddy? Another reason to stay away from GoDaddy like "the plague"!

Thread on d.o.. Something to

Thread on d.o..

Something to do with the backup / backup migrate module or their configuration.

By Heine (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 4:04pm | reply

Backup

Thread on d.o.

Something to do with the backup / backup migrate module or their configuration.

By Heine (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 4:42pm | reply

It appears the original

It appears the original poster's problem wasn't Drupal being a cancerous tumor but some development version modules being used on a production site with some possible misconfiguration thrown into the mix. (See: http://drupal.org/node/313496)

Maybe someone can let Consumerist know this is unmoderated code submitted by third party contributors. I doubt they'd care. It doesn't make for as good a story. :-/

By Ryan (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 5:32pm | reply

Watchdog?

One thing I can think of: watchdog.

Up until Drupal 5, having a lot of 404s (e.g. from relative images or something) could cause a lot of writes to the watchdog table, and that can add up quickly. But, I can't imagine this causing gigabytes of rows. Moreover, we ship Drupal 5.x with the default setting of keeping only 7 days' worth of watchdog logs.

For Drupal 6.x, we changed that to keep a set number of rows (1000 rows by default).

But the pruning in both cases depend on cron running. So perhaps he did not setup cron correctly? The site would slow to crawl before it uses that much disk space.

Update: This is now reported here. Probably the backup_migrate module, the backup module.

By Khalid (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 7:02pm | reply

Contacted GoDaddy

I've contacted Scott Loggins, Justin Jilg, and Gary Kamen at GoDaddy to discuss this matter.

If anyone has a background on the technical reasons for this I'd like to hear it. With hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites world wide and a reported over 5000 Drupal sites at GoDaddy, I am surprised this is the first time I've heard of this.

Kieran

By Kieran Lal (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 8:45pm | reply

Godaddy

I have not worked for GoDaddy for the past year. I doubt I was contacted in September. Cheers! Scott

By Scott Loggins (not verified) at Sun, 09/11/2008 - 3:26am | reply

Core dumps?

Core dumps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump, not drupal core) could do that.
Say there's a bug in ImageMagick, PHP or another binary that is triggered by some requests to drupal, and let's assume this buggy binary starts consuming tons of memory until it finally fails with a core dump, and say this type of behavior is triggered by dozens / hundreds of requests in a short time, then I see how this could have happened.
There are of course many other scenarios. In the end, you'll want to see a detailed analysis of this case. As you say, if you don't have proper limits and safeguards in place, you're just asking for bad news to arrive eventually.

By Andy (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 9:12pm | reply

Core dumps?

By Andy (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 9:14pm | reply

It appears the original

Maybe someone can let Consumerist know this is unmoderated code submitted by third party contributors. I doubt they'd care. It doesn't make for as good a story. :-/

By Ryan (not verified) at Mon, 29/09/2008 - 10:14pm | reply

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-i-dont-owe-godaddy-65_b_129276.html

By Anonymous (not verified) at Tue, 30/09/2008 - 12:37am | reply

Say there's a bug in ImageMagick, PHP or another binary that is triggered by some requests to drupal, and let's assume this buggy binary starts adtech ile reklam 2.0 dönemi başlıyor ve Trkycmhrytllbtpydrklcktr r10.net seo yarışması consuming tons of memory until it finally fails with a core dump, and say this type of behavior is triggered by dozens / hundreds of requests in a short time, then I see how this could have happened.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Fri, 14/11/2008 - 5:15pm | reply