torrus has been reported as broken. i followed the steps on wikitech for the common deadlock problem, like i have done it multiple times before:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Torrus#Deadlock_problem

just this time that did not fix it..

i made double sure all was killed, cleaned up PID files, restarted it, let it compile the XML again,.. nope

i checked /var/log/torrus/ for hints , and also /var/log/apache2/torrus* access and error logs but did not see the reason