Aphlict

Aphlict is a realtime-notification service used by Phabricator.

It uses web sockets to establish connections between end user clients and the Phabricator webserver.

This enables it do things like sending notification pop-ups and moving items on dashboards without users having to reload pages.

It was once part of the Phabricator servers like phab1001 but has since been moved to its own dedicated VM running on Ganeti.

The current VM is called aphlict1002.eqiad.wmnet and lives in eqiad.

phab:T322369 is a ticket to create its equivalent in codfw.

When you reboot a VM running aphlict by simply "reboot", it can happen that the aphlict service does not come back properly after reboot.

In this case the fix is to manually delete the pid file and start the service.

rm /var/run/aphlict/aphlict.pid
systemtctl start aphlict

Alternatively, shut the service down and make sure the PID file is gone before rebooting.