The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Derek Lofstrom <address@concealed>]

We are running Sympa 6.2.3-1.20150717.RHEL6 on CentOS 6.7 with all the most recent updates. Several times over the past month, we’ve been experiencing an issue where bulk.pl silently dies without any warning, and bulk mail processing stops, causing delivery delays that are often not discovered until several hours (or in some cases days) later. We first experienced this after upgrading to v 6.2.1 and attempted upgrading to 6.2.3 to see if the issue was resolved (which it has not been). We are a very moderate mailing list user organization; as of this date, we only have 12 or so lists that get distributed to once a day or less, so it’s not like we are processing a huge workload. But the lists that are being used are extremely important to our institution.

 

I turned up the log_level to 2 to see if anything strange got reported in the logs. Nothing stands out about bulk.pl dying, though prior to the time of death, I see the following. It gets partway through processing then just stops:

 

…

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv sympa_msg[55896]: debug2 Sympa::List::get_next_list_member(email = address@concealed)

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv sympa_msg[55896]: debug2 Sympa::List::get_list_member_no_object(2016eve, address@concealed, listserv.domain.com)

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv sympa_msg[55896]: debug Sympa::DatabaseDriver::MySQL::get_formatted_date() Building SQL date formatting

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv sympa_msg[55896]: debug Sympa::DatabaseDriver::MySQL::get_formatted_date() Building SQL date formatting

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv bulk[55902]: debug2 Sympa::Mailer::reaper() Reaper unwaited PIDs: 21082 Open = 1

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv bulk[55902]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv bulk[55902]: debug2 main:: Some childs of current process disappeared. Checking whether they shut down cleanly or not.

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv archived[55909]: debug2 Sympa::Mailer::reaper() Reaper unwaited PIDs:  Open = 0

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv archived[55909]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv bounced[55916]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

Aug 26 08:42:22 listserv bounced[55916]: debug2 Sympa::Mailer::reaper() Reaper unwaited PIDs:  Open = 0

Aug 26 08:42:27 listserv archived[55909]: debug2 Sympa::Mailer::reaper() Reaper unwaited PIDs:  Open = 0

Aug 26 08:42:27 listserv archived[55909]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

Aug 26 08:42:27 listserv bounced[55916]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

Aug 26 08:42:27 listserv bounced[55916]: debug2 Sympa::Mailer::reaper() Reaper unwaited PIDs:  Open = 0

Aug 26 08:42:28 listserv sympa_msg[55896]: debug2 Sympa::List::init_list_cache()

…..

 

Has anyone experienced this? I having difficulty finding information on the web or any user forums and do not see an existing bug logged for this specific issue (I found one for 2010 pertaining to issues relating to forking, but that it was apparently resolved in 6.2).

 

Derek Lofstrom

Senior Network Engineer

 

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