bottlenecking?

[Julian Field]

Thanks for helping investigating this. Keep me posted.

At 18:01 26/09/2002, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 11:01, Julian Field wrote:
> > Next time it happens, any chance you could tar up the incoming dir and the
> > mqueue.in dir (the incoming dir is the most useful), and take a look at it
> > off-line some time, to see if there is anything odd in there?
>
>I guess i didn't make it clear... Yes I've examined the contents of
>mqueue.in (especially those messages in the batch in process) and I
>don't see anything remarkable. Furthermore, a simple restart takes up
>where the previous instance failed and those messages already in MS's
>work dir are processed. In an attempt to duplicate the problem in a more
>controlled environment I've copied the mqueue.in contents to my test jig
>and run MS against the entire queue dir as well as using my queue feeder
>at various rates. So far I haven't managed to duplicate the problem on
>the test rig.
> >
> > Also, a "ps -fel" or "ps auxww" at the time when it is stuck, just saved to
> > a file, would be useful as that might tell us what process is actually
> > hanging up (it might be the virus scanner, it might be MailScanner, it
> > might be the TNEF decoder, all sorts of things).
> >
>I have looked the process list, thinking that it might be the virus
>scanner, but that process wasn't in the list. I'm using Sophos, so I
>don't need the TNEF decoder (though I have seen it cause problems on
>installations that required it). When I've used the external TNEF
>encoder and it causes a hang the only solution that has worked is to
>take the offending message out of the work queue. At least when that
>process is the cause the behaviour is completely repeatable.
>
>The last two times that I caught this while it was happening I could see
>the mailscanner process growing in size (apparently without bound) and
>consuming a lot of CPU. Sort of like it was in some sort of endless
>loop. What I didn't do, and will if it happens again, is to look at what
>files the mailscanner process had open and if any of those were
>changing.
>--
>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
>The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
>    Jim Levie                                 email:
>jim at entrophy-free.net

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ