What is the Scoreboard?
The ScoreboardFile is used by proftpd for tracking information for each current FTP session. It is necessary for things like MaxClients, MaxClientsPerUser, etc. The utility programs (ftpwho, ftpcount, ftptop) read the scoreboard and display its information.

Here's how proftpd handles its scoreboard: There is a default path that proftpd will use for writing its scoreboard (var/proftpd/proftpd.scoreboard). This default path depends on how you install proftpd (i.e. if you install from source and use the --prefix configure option, the default path will be adjusted to honor your --prefix). However, you can also explicitly tell the daemon what location to use for its scoreboard using the ScoreboardFile configuration directive in your proftpd.conf. When the daemon starts up, it looks to see if there is a scoreboard already there; if there isn't, it makes a new one.

The most common error encountered when opening the scoreboard is:

  unable to open scoreboard: No such file or directory

In proftpd-1.3.4rc1, a new ScoreboardMutex directive was added. This file is used as a mutex for starting/ending sessions, for improving performance under load; see Bug#3208 for the technical details. The default path (usually var/proftpd/proftpd.scoreboard.lck) for ScoreboardMutex should suffice. If you need to explicitly configure a different ScoreboardMutex file, make absolutely sure that you do not place the file on a networked filesystem. Your performance will suffer greatly if you do.

What's in the Scoreboard?
What types of information about each session is tracked in the scoreboard? What else is recorded in the scoreboard?

The ScoreboardFile records the following information about the parent/daemon proftpd process:

• scoreboard file format identifier
• daemon PID
• daemon uptime
• daemon version

• session PID
• session protocol (e.g. "ftp", "ftps", "sftp")
• session UID
• session GID
• session user name
• session server IP address/port
• session virtual host name
• session client IP address, DNS name
• session class
• time since session started

Scrubbing the Scoreboard
There is a bad habit among system administrators of using `kill -9' to kill a misbehaving process. Any process that is terminated this way, though, does not have a chance of properly shutting down. Administrators would use `kill -9' on some of proftpd's session processes, which means that they would not be able to remove their entries from the ScoreboardFile. Utilities like ftpwho and ftptop would show sessions that no longer existed.

The chance of changing this bad habit in system administrators is slim, so proftpd was changed to check the ScoreboardFile periodically. It will scan the entire file, and for each scoreboard session listed, it asks the operating system if that session process is still alive. If the answer is no, the entry is removed from the file. This process is known as "scrubbing".

By default, this scrubbing process occurs every 30 seconds. For busy/heavily loaded sites, this scrubbing interval might be too short; heavily loaded servers are more likely to encounter lock contention issues between sessions trying to update their scoreboard entry and the daemon trying to scrub the scoreboard. Such sites are advised to use ScoreboardScrub configuration directive. This directive can be used to turn on or off the periodic scrubbing, or to set a different scrub interval. The following shows some examples of ScoreboardScrub usage:

  # The default is to use scoreboard scrubbing, at the default interval
  ScoreboardScrub on

  # If we are busy server, we might want to turn off scoreboard scrubbing
  # entirely
  ScoreboardScrub off

  # Scrubbing is acceptable, but have it happen every 5 minutes instead
  ScoreboardScrub 300

Note that if scoreboard scrubbing is turned off, the ScoreboardFile can still be scrubbed on demand, either by using the mod_ctrls_admin's "ftpdctl scoreboard scrub" action, or by using the ftpscrub command-line utility.

Frequently Asked Questions
Question: Why doesn't proftpd create the needed directories, if they're not there, when opening the scoreboard?
Answer: The short answer is because that is the job of the system administrator, not the application. The long reason is that proftpd does not know the filesystem layout being used, and does not know what sort of permissions should be given to any directories it might need to create for its scoreboard.

Question: Can I copy my scoreboard from one server to another?
Answer: No. ScoreboardFiles cannot be copied from server to server; they are specific to that particular installation.

In the same fashion, you should not try to place the scoreboard on an NFS filesystem. First, attempting to share the scoreboard is not supported, and will only lead to trouble. Second, NFS does not support file locking, which proftpd requires for handling the scoreboard.

Question: Why do I see "scrubbing scoreboard" in my debugging output?
Answer: These debug messages indicate when the proftpd daemon is scrubbing the ScoreboardFile.

Question: Our site has many connections, and it looks like the logins/sessions are slow. Analysis shows that the session processes are all waiting/competing for the ScoreboardFile. What can be done to fix this?
Answer: One particular trick to use for this situation is to use /dev/null, e.g.:

  ScoreboardFile /dev/null

  error opening scoreboard: bad version (too old)

  ServerType inetd