Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tymix!tardis!oliveb!veritas!tron
From: tron@Veritas.COM (Ronald S. Karr)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Smail 3.1 core dumping question...
Message-ID: <1991Jun02.060501.15109@Veritas.COM>
Date: 2 Jun 91 06:05:01 GMT
References: <345@imp.UUCP>
Organization: VERITAS Software
Lines: 34

In article <345@imp.UUCP> devil@diablery.10A.com (Gil Tene) writes:
>The remote node (gad.fibronics) is known, and like I said 
>before, this exact same execution WILL succeed if there is 
>no "heavy" load of mail messages being delivered at the
>same time.
>
>Anyone out there have any ideas on how to fix this? The real
>bad part is that the originator is getting a failure message
>while the message is actually getting through later.

Smail operates on each message individually, so I don't quite know
how a bug in the program itself can be load related.  However, smail
does have serious problems on systems with a heavy load.  It does
not limit its usage of machine resources, in any way, so it is
capable of exhausting resources that it needs to operate (such as
memory and paging space).

There are known bugs in 3.1.19 that can cause core dumps in fairly
random situations, there are likely more.  Since these bugs are most
often related to malloc/free bugs or data-clobbering bugs, they tend to
be very machine and situationally dependent.  Also, the reported core
dump stack traces are often unrelated to the real problem (which is
often true of malloc/free bugs).

The best thing to do is to get a stack trace from the core file,
hopefully with -g-style debugging information, and to mail it to me.
That is, unless you can track down the bug and mail a fix to me,
which is even better (I think I have been reasonably responsive lately,
though I have not always been responsive in the past).  Since I only
have a few types of machines that are directly available to me, my
ability to track down vague problems is very limited.
-- 
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