[nwp: Re: Any clue on this one?]

[Nick Phillips]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 07:44:38PM -0500, Kelly Hamlin wrote:

> nothing. I would continuously do ps -x to see what its doing, then


ps tells you the status of a process (often "S", can be "R", "D"...)
Any idea what this was most of the time?

"top" is usually slightly more useful than "ps".

And if you really want to know what a process is doing, then you need to
trace what it's actually doing. On linux, you use "strace" or "ltrace".

On Solaris, you want to look at "truss".

These tools will tell you what system/library calls a program is making,
which will tell you what's holding it up.


Other than DNS holdups and long timeouts waiting for the virus scanner to
finish, I don't know of anything that's likely to cause mailscanner that
kind of problem.

It does sound like it may have been one "awkward" message causing the problem
though -- that would explain why it suddenly fixed itself.


Cheers,


Nick

--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the beach.