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  • Counting systemd service restarts: NRestarts and the D-Bus API behind it

    calendar Aug 18, 2026 · 14 min read · Linux systemd  ·
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    A while ago I debugged a resource leak caused by a service stuck in a restart loop. Each restart left a process behind, and after a few minutes the host had over a thousand copies of it. Nothing alerted on the loop itself. We noticed CPU and memory climbing, and only found the restart loop after reading the journal. …


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  • Replacing socat with systemd-socket-proxyd

    calendar Mar 30, 2026 · 3 min read · Linux Systemd Bottlerocket  ·
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    Bottlerocket v11.0.0 dropped the socat package from bottlerocket-core-kit (#742). If you had a service that relied on socat to bridge a Unix Domain Socket (UDS) to a TCP port, you need a replacement. This post shows how to use systemd-socket-proxyd instead. Why socat was used soci-snapshotter exposes its metrics …


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  • Use KillMode=process with caution: restart loop could deplete resources

    calendar Dec 12, 2025 · 4 min read · Linux systemd  ·
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    I recently debugged a resource leak where a systemd service kept restarting while leaving a process behind after each restart. The root cause isn't particularly interesting: a backward-incompatible third-party dependency upgrade. But the debugging process and lessons learned are. Thousands of zombie processes from a …


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  • Spawning a New Process for Socket-Activated Daemons is Error-Prone

    calendar Dec 10, 2025 · 4 min read · Linux systemd Container  ·
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    I recently debugged a mysterious latency issue: after migrating a systemd service from path-activation to socket-activation, there was a consistent ~1 second time-to-available latency. The culprit was a bad practice—starting the daemon program as a new process in socket-activation. Let's dive into the details. Starting …


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Peng Zhang

Software Engineer

Recent Posts

  • Mysterious boot hang on Graviton: mitigated but never root-caused
  • What is an ABI? Break one to find out
  • Counting systemd service restarts: NRestarts and the D-Bus API behind it
  • Apply sysctl before systemd: a lesson from reserving ephemeral ports too late
  • Don't hardcode fsync in your library
  • When enforcing OCI image spec broke customer containers
  • Why a Trailing Dot in DNS Can Break Your Customers
  • How cgo silently disables Go's deadlock detector

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Peng Zhang

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