On Tue, 17 Dec 1996, Pam Skillman wrote:
pamela> I have a user that is having trouble with procmail forking lots
pamela> of processes owned by him when he isn't using procmail to filter
pamela> mail or forward mail. It forks so many processes that it
pamela> degrades the system and they must be killed. This person is in
pamela> lots of aliases that get alot of mail (root, etc...)... When it
pamela> happens, he says he just opens 'pine', reads some mail, closes
pamela> pine and there are the procmail processes owned by him. It
pamela> doesn't happen everytime he reads mail...just sporadically.
pamela>
pamela> Lots of us other people on the same system are using procmail to
pamela> filter our mail and we are not seeing any problems.
pamela>
pamela> I am stumped. Any suggestions on where to look or how to get
pamela> more information?? I didn't see anything in the logs when he
pamela> said it happened last... :(
There's not much data here. Perhaps the user has a global lockfile in
his .procmailrc, which then has to wait on his pine lockfiles? If so,
perhaps local lockfiles would do.
To get more diagnostic data, make sure .procmailrc has lines similar to
LOGFILE=procmail.LOG
VERBOSE=yes # extended diagnostics
at the top, then run pine and look at the log file.
pamela> P.S. Is this an actual mailing list that I can join or a
pamela> private one??
The former. For more details, check the output of procmail -v or the
last section of the procmail(1) man page.
Regards,
--
Rick Troxel Rick_Troxel(_at_)nih(_dot_)gov
rick(_at_)helix(_dot_)nih(_dot_)gov
http://www.dc-sage.org/bios/rick_troxel 301/435-2983
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