Respawning server died, can't figure out why

[Nathan Vander Wilt]

I'm trying to keep a second instance of CouchDB running on a server, so I made 
it its own config file and start it in the background with respawning enabled:

    $~/build-couchdb/build/bin/couchdb -b -r 5 -a ~/some-instance/couch.ini -o 
~/some-instance/couch.stdout -e ~/some-instance/couch.stderr

Twice now I've had this server quit on me. The first time, it was out of disk 
because I'd forgot to turn on autocompaction, so I figured it was somehow 
related to that and didn't worry terribly much. The second time brings me here, 
because I can't find any cause for it.

I've got 1.7GB disk free and 2GB of memory available at the moment, so it 
doesn't seem to be either of those. (I could not find any out-of-memory process 
kill logs in /var/log/syslog.) The only clue I can find is in couchdb.stderr:

    heart_beat_kill_pid = 1390
    heart_beat_timeout = 11
    heart: Tue Aug 13 18:34:21 2013: heart-beat time-out, no activity for 15 
seconds
    Killed
    heart: Tue Aug 13 18:34:22 2013: Executed 
"/home/natevw/build-couchdb/build/bin/couchdb -k". Terminating.
    
    heart_beat_kill_pid = 27730
    heart_beat_timeout = 11

Nothing particularly interesting in the main log, just one last happily 
fulfilled request then a long gap before I intervened and manually re-ran the 
startup command above:

    [Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:34:10 GMT] [info] [<0.26885.16>] 127.0.0.1 - - GET 
/_session 200
    [Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:08:59 GMT] [info] [<0.32.0>] Apache CouchDB has 
started on http://127.0.0.1:5555/


Any idea why the server would seemingly kill itself, and not come back up? This 
is on Ubuntu 13.04, CouchDB 1.3.0 and Erlang R15B02 via build-couchdb.

thanks,
-natevw





For completeness, here's my ~/some-instance/couch.ini file:

    [couchdb]
    database_dir = /home/natevw/some-instance/data
    view_index_dir = /home/natevw/some-instance/data
    uri_file = /home/natevw/some-instance/couch.uri
    pid_file = /home/natevw/some-instance/couch.pid
    
    [httpd]
    port = 5555
    
    [log]
    file = /home/natevw/some-instance/couch.log
    
    [couch_httpd_auth]
    timeout = 60000
    
    [admins]
    admin = -pbkdf2-x,x,x
    
    [compactions]
    _default = [{db_fragmentation, "70%"}, {view_fragmentation, "60%"}]