The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Tornóci László <address@concealed>]

On 07/31/2012 05:37 PM, Tornóci László wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been running sympa for a few years now without major problems
> (currently using 6.1.7 on RHEL 6.3). There was a blackout on July 25,
> the server suddenly lost electricity then later restarted. Since then
> task_manager.pl takes 98% of CPU, and consumes more and more RAM to the
> point that it consumes all, and the system will kill the process. This
> happens all the time I restart sympa. I have about 160 tasks in
> sympa/spool/tasks, their dates are mostly July 25. I tried to remove all
> tasks from sympa/spool/tasks (stopped sympa, moved all the files to
> another dir, then restarted sympa) but that didn't change anything. So I
> guess the problem is not the tasks themselves.
> There is nothing special in the logs (/var/log/messages):

In the meantime I managed to solve this problem. First I tried to start 
task_manager.pl by hand with the options -d -F. No output except the usual:
task_manager.pl: notice tools::write_pid() Previous process 17702 died 
suddenly ; notifying listmaster
and the process started to eat RAM.

Then I killed the process, deleted the sympa/task_manager.pid and 
started again: an voila task_manager flooded the screen with output, RAM 
consumption remained reasonable and the tasks in sympa/spool/tasks got 
handled correcly and replaced with future tasks.

Right now I cannot reproduce the problem. A stale pid file alone won't 
trigger the problem. Looks like you need a combination of tasks in 
sympa/spool/tasks that are past deadline AND a stale pid file present to 
trigger the problem I described. I managed to have this combination 
because of the blackout period. However, it is really bad behaviour, 
that I encountered. I definitely suggest the developers review the code.

Another problem I've had and fixed, that syslog logging was set to 
LOCAL1 in /etc/sympa.conf, but LOCAL1 was not defined in 
/etc/rsyslogd.conf. I don't know if this may have contributed to the 
problem I had.

                                        Yours: Laszlo