The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Johann Spies <address@concealed>]

I have replaced majordomo with sympa as our main listserver and it
worked well on Debian Stable for a few weeks.  Now users are starting
to complain about Sympa being very slow to deliver mail.  I have
tested it and it is so.

Since yesterday when this is happening I saw that Sympa was using up
to 99%  of the cpu and a lot of memory (running on a 2x2.8Ghz CPU
server with 4 Gig of ram):

 10:38:54 up 7 days, 3:01, 1 user, load average: 3.16, 2.08, 1.47 144
processes: 139 sleeping, 3 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states:
29.4% user, 1.5% system, 7.2% nice, 61.9% idle Mem: 3881872K total,
1764372K used, 2117500K free, 186628K buffers Swap: 2097136K total,
17160K used, 2079976K free, 866888K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 9822 sympa     12   0  467M 467M  2028 R    99.8 12.3   3:11 sympa.pl
13814 spamd     18  15 28188  25M 15124 R N   9.9  0.6   0:00 spamd

When I try and stop the sympa process  using "/etc/init.d/sympa
stop" it would not die down.  I did not want to use a kill -9 in this
case.  Trying to "/etc/init.d/sympa restart" (also for wwsympa)  did
not make a difference today although yesterday it seemed to kick sympa
into action.

Exim have delivered mail to sympa but it does not appear in the
archive of the list.  Requesting a password to be sent out also
results in a long delay.  The Sympa log records the request but sympa
does not deliver the email to exim.

The last few lines in /var/log/sympa.log does not help me a lot to
understand the problem:

============
Sep 17 10:41:16 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: Connected to Database sympa
Sep 17 10:41:16 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: reception is not compatible
between default_user_options and \available_user_options in
/var/lib/sympa/expl/bulletin
Sep 17 10:41:16 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: Missing parameter "subject" in
/var/lib/sympa/expl/consecol-postgrads/config
Sep 17 10:41:16 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: Missing parameter "subject" in
/var/lib/sympa/expl/medstud/config
Sep 17 10:41:17 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: [client 146.232.128.30] [user
address@concealed] [list sexuality_education] d_access_control
Sep 17 10:41:17 mail3 wwsympa[16803]: [client 146.232.128.30] [user
address@concealed] [list sexuality_education] do_review(0)
Sep 17 10:41:28 mail3 wwsympa[17495]: WWSympa started
Sep 17 10:41:28 mail3 wwsympa[17495]: Loading locale file fr.cat
version 3.3a
...
Sep 17 10:41:28 mail3 wwsympa[17495]: Loading locale file hu.cat
version 3.3a
Sep 17 10:41:28 mail3 wwsympa[17495]: Connected to Database sympa
Sep 17 10:41:28 mail3 wwsympa[17495]: reception is not compatible
between default_user_options and available_user_options in
/var/lib/sympa/expl/bulletin
===================

What does this "reception is not compatible..." lines in the log
indicate?  And how do I correct the problem?

Regards
Johann
-- 
Johann Spies          Telefoon: 021-808 4036
Informasietegnologie, Universiteit van Stellenbosch

     "Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the  
      firstfruits of all thine increase; So shall thy barns 
      be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out
      with new wine."      Proverbs 3:9,10