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From: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (Paul Pomes - UofIllinois CSO)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Sendmail problem..
Keywords: Sendmail
Message-ID: <1990Dec14.144843.28375@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 90 14:48:43 GMT
References: <724@nuts.nu.oz.au>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 58

gary@nucs.cs.nu.oz (Gary Carroll) writes:

>Hello,
>
>I hope you can help us with this problem:
>
>Sendmail is leaving processes such as the ones below after sending mail.
>The syslog file says that the status of the mail is sent and we can confirm
>that the mail has arrived. These processes stay indefinitely chewing up
>CPU time like crazy. We'd like to get rid of this problem! Any suggestions
>or hints where to look would be more than welcome.
>
>We are using v5.65 of sendmail on a Sun 3/60.
>
>USER       PID %CPU %MEM   SZ  RSS TT STAT START  TIME COMMAND
>root      1465 24.3  0.1  176   16 p1 R    14:06  22:39 -AA01463 arp.anu.edu.au:
>root      1420 23.9  0.1  176   16 p1 R    13:58  26:02 -AA01418 arp.anu.edu.au:
>root      1362 22.3  0.1  176   16 p6 R    13:43  40:03 -AA01356 arp.anu.edu.au:

Examine the spool directory for old tfAA* files.  Chances are that you'll find
three with the same uid in the filename as the spinning processes.  Sendmail
is spinning in the top of queueup() in a do loop that tries to exclusively open
the control file:

	do {
		strcpy(tf, queuename(e, 't'));
		fd = open(tf, O_CREAT|O_WRONLY|O_EXCL, FileMode);
		if (fd < 0) {
			if ( errno != EEXIST) {
				syserr("queueup: cannot create temp file %s",
					tf);
				return NULL;
			}
		} else {
			if (flock(fd, LOCK_EX|LOCK_NB) < 0) {
				if (errno != EWOULDBLOCK && errno != EAGAIN)
					syserr("cannot flock(%s)", tf);
				close(fd);
				fd = -1;
				sleep(1);
			}
		}
	} while (fd < 0);

If the file exists, sendmail assumes some other sendmail has it and will
let go of it Real Soon.  If it belongs to a dead process, sendmail spins
forever.

My fix was to remove any pending tf* files at boot time.  In addition
I added a else clause with a syserr and sleep after the test for EEXIST.
Why the tf* files are accumulating should be investigated as well.

/pbp
--
         Paul Pomes

UUCP: {att,iuvax,uunet}!uiucuxc!paul   Internet, BITNET: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
US Mail:  UofIllinois, CSO, 1304 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL  61801-2910