The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[micah anderson <address@concealed>]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:30:24 -0400, "K. Clair" <address@concealed> wrote:
> It turns out that sympa was trying to send >12GB of logs about its 
> previous crashed process!

More specifically, what had happened was that sympa had been running
since May 6th of this year. When we had a power outage, the
/home/sympa/sympa.pid was not cleared because of an unclean
shutdown. When sympa starts up, and it finds that stale .pid file, it
then sends an email to the listmasters by using the 'crash' type in
listmaster_notification.tt2. That template does this:

...
[%|loc%]Errors:[%END%]

[% FOREACH err IN crash_err%]
...

which after some investigation reveals that there is a function in
tools.pm which pulls in the contents of the error file, which is in
/home/sympa/spool/tmp/$PID.stderr by default. 

That file contained a LOT of errors, and it seems like the template
toolkit parser tried to parse it all, eating up all of our available
memory until we ran out.

We are running 6.0.1, and I think some of these errors have been fixed,
but we've got a significant number of these in our .stderr files:

Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at /usr/lib/perl5/Sys/Syslog.pm line 
365.
Warning: Unrecognized variable: "tag"
Warning: Unrecognized variable: "yyyy"
Warning: Unrecognized variable: "mois"
Use of uninitialized value $_[2] in sprintf at /usr/lib/perl5/Sys/Syslog.pm 
line 365.

Those lines, especially the "tag" one are repeated a large number of
times among a handful of other errors that aren't as frequent. 

micah

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