Preview of a new maintenance release

admin

Dear all,
We've just released on our Beta channel for X2 customers a preview of a new maintenance release.
The new version features the following additions and fixes:
* Added automatic handling of the maximum number of processed requests for FastCGI interpreters with a special focus on PHP's case
* Added a default special timeout to better handle reverse-proxying WebSocket back-ends
* Implemented a policy to mitigate any potential BREACH attack by preventing compressed dynamic content over HTTPS
* Added support for redirecting HTTP clear-text requests to their HTTPS counterpart when made on a TLS/SSL-enabled port
* Added support for handling and generating certificates bound to IP addresses and International Domain Names
* Added case-insensitivity support to user names
* Fixed issues and added minor improvements to low-level networking routines
* Updated the internals of the console for better responsiveness
A changelog with detailed descriptions of the above points is available in https://aprelium.com/abyssws/changelog.html#2.16.20 .

tfh

Cool... I've installed the beta and will keep you guys updated.
Right now I have a script that kills and restarts the server every hour. I will remove this for now to see if it remains stable.

admin

tfh wrote
Cool... I've installed the beta and will keep you guys updated.
Right now I have a script that kills and restarts the server every hour. I will remove this for now to see if it remains stable.

Thank you a lot for installing and giving the new preview a try on your production servers.
By the way, we've been greatly overwhelmed by the quick and positive feedback of many of our customers who had access to the preview.
So thank you for your continuous support.

tfh

The new version has been up & running for 3 days now. And feels quick, especially the GUI feels a bit more snappy. Also my pages that rely on .php feel quicker.

admin

tfh,
These are wonderful news. Thank you for reporting back to us about the preview of the maintenance release.
Meanwhile, we've worked on a new preview with a bug fix and improved mitigation to HTTP/2-specific DDoS attacks.
Please check our next post for more details.

admin

Dear all,
A second preview of the upcoming maintenance release just been published on our Beta channel.
Version 2.16.20.1 features the following changes :
* Fixed an issue when reverse-proxying POST requests served from Web servers which do not correctly handle HTTP/1.0 requests.
* Added mechanisms to mitigate DDoS attacks using reset frames and malformed HTTP/2 requests.
A detailed changelog is available in https://aprelium.com/abyssws/changelog.html#2.16.20.1 .
Customers of Abyss Web Server X2 subscribed to our Beta program will be notified by email about the new preview.
Users of the free edition Abyss Web Server can give the new version a try by downloading and upgrading from one of the following links :
* Windows: https://aprelium.com/data/abwsx1-2-16-20-1.exe
* macOS: https://aprelium.com/data/abwsx1-2-16-20-1.dmg
* Linux: https://aprelium.com/data/abwsx1-2-16-20-1.tgz
Upgrade instructions are listed in <https://aprelium.com/abyssws/download.php#upgrade>.

Lithorien

As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.

admin

Lithorien wrote
As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.

Could you please contact our priority support email? It'd help to include your license string or a copy of your abyss.conf file to locate your customer id.

tfh

Lithorien wrote
As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.

Oh, wow... So I was not the only one, killing the server every hour.

Lithorien

admin wrote

Lithorien wrote
As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.

Could you please contact our priority support email? It'd help to include your license string or a copy of your abyss.conf file to locate your customer id.

Done and thank you for the beta access! It has already shown massive improvements!
Also glad to give y'all a shout where I can at https://bsky.app/profile/bear-den.org/post/3lyg3fcf3vk2d - would love to see Aprelium getting a presence there too!

Lithorien

tfh wrote

Lithorien wrote
As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.
Oh, wow... So I was not the only one, killing the server every hour.

Nope! I had a crontab set up that restarted both abyssws and php-fpm on the hour, every hour, because otherwise I had a massive memory leak from php-fpm and abyssws stopped responding to any requests.
The beta has fixed that problem for me, at least over the last ~12 hours since install, with no signs of needing to put the restarts back in place yet. I'm extremely happy about this; my customers are also reporting better response times on the commonly loaded pages (though initial response still seems very slow on occasion; likely a problem with my PHP settings, not Abyss) and the php-fpm processes are terminating like they should be now.
Very happy with the update so far!

tfh

Lithorien wrote

tfh wrote

Lithorien wrote
As someone who has had a lot of PHP related issues recently (including having to write a crontab to restart abyssws on the hour, every hour), how would I go about getting in to this beta program? I'm a paying X2 customer already but don't see anywhere to sign up for beta access.
Oh, wow... So I was not the only one, killing the server every hour.

Nope! I had a crontab set up that restarted both abyssws and php-fpm on the hour, every hour, because otherwise I had a massive memory leak from php-fpm and abyssws stopped responding to any requests.
The beta has fixed that problem for me, at least over the last ~12 hours since install, with no signs of needing to put the restarts back in place yet. I'm extremely happy about this; my customers are also reporting better response times on the commonly loaded pages (though initial response still seems very slow on occasion; likely a problem with my PHP settings, not Abyss) and the php-fpm processes are terminating like they should be now.
Very happy with the update so far!

Part of the script that runs every hour on my Windows based server:

I've removed this last week to see if it remains stable. Right now, it seems to be running quite nicely.

Horizon

tfh wrote
Oh, wow... So I was not the only one, killing the server every hour.

Please don't kill the Abyss Web Server process before making a backup of your abyss.conf file, otherwise you risk losing it if there was any configuration writing at the same time (such as ACME certificate update).
It happened to me once and fortunately I had a backup to restore it.

admin

Horizon wrote
Please don't kill the Abyss Web Server process before making a backup of your abyss.conf file, otherwise you risk losing it if there was any configuration writing at the same time (such as ACME certificate update).
It happened to me once and fortunately I had a backup to restore it.

We second that warning: Abyss Web Server responds cleanly to each systems way of telling it "please stop".
On Windows, you can use

net stop "Abyss Web Server"

and it will do the required to stop gracefully within a second or two.

tfh

I do see the Abyss.exe program, gradually using more and more memory while it's running:

The server has been restarted 9 days ago:

admin

tfh,
This does not look like a leak: It's probably due to a high number of HTTP/2 connections coupled with the new lazy memory block release behavior.
Memory is now no more released back to the system as eagerly as it was the case in previous versions, especially if you're not short of RAM resources.
Anyway, please keep us updated if you still see a persistent increase of memory use.

tfh

admin wrote
tfh,
This does not look like a leak: It's probably due to a high number of HTTP/2 connections coupled with the new lazy memory block release behavior.
Memory is now no more released back to the system as eagerly as it was the case in previous versions, especially if you're not short of RAM resources.
Anyway, please keep us updated if you still see a persistent increase of memory use.

Well, the machine has 32GByte, so.. who knows.
I did reboot today, but I will keep an eye on it.

tfh

At what kind of memory usage should I start to get worried:

admin

tfh wrote
At what kind of memory usage should I start to get worried:

Can you share your abyss.conf file with our support team?
We suspect a high value for "maximum simultaneous connections" which can interfere badly with HTTP/2 and high timeout values. There is no good value, it all depends on your use case. But you can expect RAM to increase with an average of 64 Kb for each HTTP/2 stream, and up to 40 streams by default for each HTTP/2 connection. Now multiply that by "maximum simultaneous connections" and you see where it can lead...