The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

Which version of Sympa?

This question came up a few weeks back with someone else.  I mentioned then 
that I had only experienced the problem myself when running 6.1.x with an 
outdated MIME::Charset perl module (prior to 1.11.3), which was unable to 
decode a message subject line containing MIME-encoded accented characters.  
Soji also mentioned this as a fixed issue.

Other people mentioned that it can be caused by file system full and similar.

Your issue looks like a process stuck in a busy Disk-Wait state and new 
processes being spawned to replace it... not like my problem.  You might like 
to shut down Sympa and run an fsck on your /var filesystem (or wherever Sympa 
is living)

Soji mentioned about unreapable zombies of bulk.pl -- which sounds like this. 
 He says it is likely fixed in 6.2.12

See Soji's message of 16/12/15 in the mailing list archives for the full 
details

HTH

Steve

Steve Shipway
University of Auckland ITS
UNIX Systems Design Lead
address@concealed
Ph: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86487


________________________________________
From: address@concealed 
[address@concealed] on behalf of Miles Fidelman 
[address@concealed]
Sent: Saturday, 2 January 2016 1:40 p.m.
To: address@concealed
Subject: Re: [sympa-users] Help!!! - sympa.pl is dying - fixed, but

Hi Folks,

Fixed it, by the simple expedient of cleaning out queues manually. I
expect something about some message was choking Sympa.

Still... for future reference... any thoughts on how to identify a
specific message that might be causing problems - through higher levels
of logging, location in a specific queue, specific error messages, etc.?

Thanks,

Miles

On 1/1/16 6:54 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Our server crashed the other day, and since restoring it, I've been
> having a rather perplexing (and debilitating) problem with sympa.
>
> ../sympa start
> - all the processes start
>
> within a few minutes:
> - ../sympa status shows that sympa.pl has died ("sympa died, pid file
> remains")
> - can't seem to find anything in the log file to explain things
> - ps shows that sympa.pl is still running, but in state "D"
> (uninterruptable sleep)
> - and, it seems to start eating up more and more CPU cycles (and maybe
> other resources)
> - system load avg. starts climbing to the point of slowing the system
> to a crawl
>
> I have to kill the process manually to restore everything else.
>
> Any thoughts on what might be going on, or what I might do to diagnose
> things
>
> Thanks!
>
> Miles Fidelman
>

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra