On September 24, 1998 at 13:37, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
I am finding that MHonArc is intermittantly leaving a lockfile around,
suggesting abnormal termination. I manually delete the file, and about
a day or two later it happens again. And again.
...
The list isn't my biggest, but it does have the high traffic (about 20
messages a day) and just shy of 20,000 messages archived. Larger list
archives (albeit with lower traffic these days) seem to be doing
fine. Only one MHonArc runs at a time, and I believe I have enough
system resources. I use -savemem and -add, along with a lot of other
customizations.
-savemem only buys you something if you process multiple messages
in a single process. If only doing a single message each time, it
buys you nothing but a little slow-down.
Could I have a corrupt database? Do I need to rebuild it?
Any thoughts on trouble shooting? I haven't caught this behavior
during a manual run yet.
Its a tough problem to diagnose. If DB corruption, an error should
have been generated (from Perl). Are you capturing/logging stderr? If
updates look okay after removing the lock file, I would guess the DB is
okay.
If using v2.3 (in beta), you can use -nolock if you are using a
pre-filter like Procmail. I.e. You can use Procmail's locking
capabilities to insure single process access to the archive. I would
guess that Procmail's locking mechanism is more robust than MHonArc's.
Note, MHonArc tries to capture signals that cause termination.
However, it is known that Perl's signal handling is not perfect. Even
though I do nothing fancy with signal handling, it may be possible it
is a source of problems if signals are involved in anyway.
--ewh
----
Earl Hood | University of California: Irvine
ehood(_at_)medusa(_dot_)acs(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu | Electronic
Loiterer
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/ | Dabbler of SGML/WWW/Perl/MIME
