procmail
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Re: procmail process forking lots of processes

1996-12-19 10:56:58
On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Rick Troxel wrote:

Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 21:20:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Rick Troxel <rick(_at_)helix(_dot_)nih(_dot_)gov>
To: procmail mailing list 
<procmail(_at_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de>
cc: Pam Skillman <pamela(_at_)infi(_dot_)net>
Subject: Re: procmail process forking lots of processes
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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.


Unfortunately, I don't have much data...sigh..  You must have missed 
the part about "..he isn't using procmail to filter mail or forward 
mail."  This person doesn't have a .procmailrc file or a .forward
file of any kind.  Sendmail uses procmail as the local delivery agent.

I found out yesterday when this user had more problems that he was using
a different pine and a different sendmail than everyone else!!  They were
stuck in non-standard places and his path picked them up first!! eeekkk..
I had just upgraded sendmail to 8.8.3, but both the old sendmail and the
new sendmail were using the same sendmail.cf file that references the
one and only procmail on the system.  He also experienced this problem
*before* I upgraded the sendmail binary....

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.


This would definitely be beneficial for him to create a .procmailrc file
with just these 2 lines in it to get more information if the problem
recurs.  yes...yes..!

thank you very much for your help!! 

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.


Yeah...procmail -v is how I found out about it...I was just confused. :)

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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pamela(_at_)infi(_dot_)net                                Pamela J. Skillman
http://www.usgcc.odu.edu                       Systems Engineer III
(757) 624-2295 (x3082)                         Systems Engineering
(757) 624-2473  FAX                            InfiNet
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