dying children?

[Drew Marshall]

On 1 Aug 2008, at 14:36, Julian Field wrote:

>
>
> Drew Marshall wrote:
>> On 1 Aug 2008, at 10:09, Julian Field wrote:
>>>
>>> Richard Siddall wrote:
>>>> Julian Field wrote:
>>>>> Someone else showed me a message that suffered the same problem  
>>>>> a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything I  
>>>>> can do about it, sorry. It's to do with nesting in the HTML  
>>>>> analysis code. Once it gets too nested up, Perl segfaults.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jules
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Jules,
>>>>
>>>> Does that mean it's something like an out-of-memory error in one  
>>>> of the CPAN modules?  Can we fix it by getting the module author  
>>>> to handle excessive nesting?
>>> The most likely culprit is HTML::Parser, but I have direct  
>>> evidence to back that. I just know that it's in the HTML parsing  
>>> where it falls over. Does HTML::Parser contain any non-Perl code?
>>
>>
>> Jules
>>
>> I seem to get a number of, what I think are, these types of mail  
>> that choke MS and hold the child process up until it times out. Is  
>> there any way that a mail that causes this sort of time out to be  
>> automatically quarantined? Perhaps by changing the scan time out  
>> from a batch time out to a message time out?
>>
>> The problem that I see is that if a batch has 10 messages in it  
>> (Often mainly Spam) 1 of the messages chokes spam scanning, the  
>> whole batch times out and lets the all the other spam messages  
>> through for delivery.
> It's not a timeout issue. If it hits this, it brings the entire Perl  
> system crashing down. Wrapping it in an eval and timeout may not  
> help. It would certainly add more overhead.
>
> I am open to all suggestions though!

Ahh, I see. Can I request this anyway? I am seeing a number of time  
outs (Like upwards of 50 since midnight today!) from SpamAssassin  
which I just can't diagnose. The problem message always seems to stop  
at the point it starts running body checks (Or at least that's the  
line it displays last before hanging). I have done all the usual stuff  
but as I can't easily capture the problem messages as they are  
delivered after the time out limit is hit, I am struggling to put them  
somewhere for some expert help.

Drew

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