The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Omen Wild <address@concealed>]

[ This is the first email of 2 for Sympa hangs we have had recently. ]

Last week we had Sympa hang two different days trying to process the
digests for a mailing list.  I finally received permission from the
list owner to post the digests, which I have made available at
<https://descolada.ucdavis.edu/sympa/sympa-broken-digests.tar.bz2>.

The sympa.pl process went to 100% CPU and stayed there for hours, until
the mail queues backed up and we were paged.  I had to kill -9 that Sympa
process to get it to stop, "/etc/init.d/sympa stop" didn't work.
Every time I restarted Sympa it would get to the same point of processing
the digest for the list biosci-ggg-stu and go to 100% CPU.  I have an
strace (in the above .tar.bz2 as sympa.pl.strace) that starts shortly
after the process starts and ends after it goes into the 100% CPU
loop.  Nothing stands out in the trace, but hopefully others will see
something interesting.

The server is an up to date RHEL 6, kernel 2.6.32-71.24.1.el6.x86_64,
running sympa-6.1.4-1.20110407.RHEL6.src.rpm downloaded from
<http://sympa-ja.org/download/rhel/6/stable/SRPMS/>.  We have some custom
patches, but nothing that touches the digest code.

I have attached output from sympa_wizard.pl --check.  All modules are
up to date as of March.

Anyone have any thoughts on what could have caused this or how to
avoid it in the future?

Thanks,
   Omen

-- 
Omen Wild
Security Administrator
(530) 752-1700
[root@mauve ~]# /usr/sbin/sympa_wizard.pl --check      
##########################################################################################
# This process will help you install all Perl (CPAN) modules required by 
Sympa software.
# Sympa requires from 50 to 65 additional Perl modules to run properly. 
# The whole installation process should take around 15 minutes.
# You'll first have to configure the CPAN shell itself and select your 
favourite CPAN server.
# Note that you might prefer to install the required Perl modules using your 
favourite DEB/RPM mechanism.
# Feel free to interrupt the process if needed ; you can restart it safely 
afterward.
##############################################################################################
Strike return key to continue...

******* Check perl for SYMPA ********

Checking for PERL version:
-----------------------------
your version of perl is OK (5.010001  >= 5.008)

Checking for REQUIRED modules:
------------------------------------------
perl module          from CPAN       STATUS
-----------          ---------       ------
Archive::Zip         Archive-Zip    OK (1.31_01 >= 1.05)
CGI                  CGI            OK (3.35   >= 3.35)
DBD::mysql           Msql-Mysql-modulesOK (4.013  >= 4.008)
DBI                  DBI            OK (1.609  >= 1.48)
DB_File              DB_FILE        OK (1.82   >= 1.75)
Digest::MD5          Digest-MD5     OK (2.39   >= 2.00)
Encode               Encode         OK (2.35   >= 1.0)
FCGI                 FCGI           OK (0.71   >= 0.67)
File::Copy::Recursive File-Copy-RecursiveOK (0.38   >= 0.36)
HTML::FormatText     HTML-Format    OK (2.04   >= 1.0)
HTML::StripScripts::Parser HTML-StripScripts-ParserOK (1.03   >= 1.03)
HTML::TreeBuilder    HTML-Tree      OK (4.1    >= 1.0)
IO::Scalar           IO-stringy     OK (2.110  >= 1.0)
LWP                  libwww-per     OK (5.833  >= 1.0)
Locale::TextDomain   libintl-perl   OK (1.20   >= 1.0)
MHonArc::UTF8        MHonArc        OK (2.6.16 >= 2.6.0)
MIME::Base64         MIME-Base64    OK (3.08   >= 3.03)
MIME::Charset        MIME-Charset   OK (1.006.2 >= 1.006.2)
MIME::EncWords       MIME-EncWords  OK (1.010.101 >= 1.010)
MIME::Lite::HTML     MIME-Lite-HTML OK (1.23   >= 1.23)
MIME::Tools          MIME-tools     OK (5.423  >= 5.423)
Net::Netmask         Net-Netmask    OK (1.9015 >= 1.9015)
Template             Template-ToolkitOK (2.22   >= 1.0)
Term::ProgressBar    Term-ProgressBarOK (2.09   >= 2.09)
Text::LineFold       Unicode-LineBreakOK (2011.0 >= 0.008)
Time::HiRes          Time-HiRes     OK (1.9721 >= 1.29)
URI::Escape          URI-Escape     OK (3.29   >= 1.35)
XML::LibXML          XML-LibXML     OK (1.70   >= 1.0)

Checking for OPTIONAL modules:
------------------------------------------
perl module          from CPAN       STATUS
-----------          ---------       ------
AuthCAS              AuthCAS        OK (1.4    >= 1.4)
Crypt::CipherSaber   CipherSaber    OK (1.00   >= 0.50)
DBD::Oracle          DBD-Oracle     OK (1.27   >= 0.90)
DBD::Pg              DBD-Pg         OK (2.15.1 >= 0.90)
DBD::SQLite          DBD-SQLite     OK (1.27   >= 0.90)
DBD::Sybase          DBD-Sybase     was not found on this system.
Setting FTP Passive mode
-> Usage of this module: Sybase database driver, required if you connect to a 
Sybase database.
-> Install module DBD::Sybase ? [n]n
File::NFSLock        File-NFSLock   OK (1.20   >= 1.0)
IO::Socket::SSL      IO-Socket-SSL  OK (1.31   >= 0.90)
Mail::DKIM           Mail-DKIM      OK (0.37   >= 0.36)
Net::LDAP            perl-ldap      OK (0.40   >= 0.27)
Net::SMTP            libnet         OK (2.31   >= 1.0)
SOAP::Lite           SOAP-Lite      OK (0.712  >= 0.60)
******* NOTE *******
You can retrieve all theses modules from any CPAN server
(for example ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/computing/CPAN/CPAN.html)

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