Developers of Sympa

[Adam Bernstein <address@concealed>]

Sympa folks --

I need a quick bit of help understanding something, to try to solve a bug 
we've been dealing with for > 2 years that must be somehow related to 
modifications I've made, because apparently no one else sees this bug.  The 
problem is that, occasionally and without any apparent pattern, the 
sympa.pl process that Sympa spawns to send a digest gets hung after sending 
and fails to exit.  It remains running, and eventually halts all Sympa 
activity until we manually kill and restart Sympa.  I've done everything I 
can think of to debug where the problem occurs, and that "everything" 
includes a lot, with no luck.

So I'm hoping you can help me understand one critical part of it: Where in 
the code does Sympa spawn this extra process for sending a digest, and 
where in the code is it supposed to exit when it's done?  I can't find 
anything that looks like it would do it, which may be partly because I know 
nothing about spawning one process from inside another.  Any help would be 
*greatly* appreciated.

Thanks!
     adam