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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Smail 3.1 core dumping question...
Message-ID: <1991Jun04.142327.29640@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 4 Jun 91 14:23:27 GMT
References: <345@imp.UUCP>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 34

In article <345@imp.UUCP> devil@diablery.10A.com (Gil Tene) writes:
>Hello UUCPeople,
>
>I am running an Smail 3.1.19 configuration (straight off the
>uunet archives), and I have lately been getting core dumps 
>from Smail during heavy uucp mail transfers. The core dumps
>are not consistent, and the data of the mail message is NOT
>lost, it is sent succesfully 20 min. later during the next
>smail daemon pass. I have not been able to generate these
>core dumps on purpose, since it does not seem to be the 
>actual mail message data that causes them, but a combination 
>of data and load, probably causing some locking problems.

It may be memory problems instead, expecially if you have set
delivery_mode = background in the config file.  If you do this,
uuxqt won't wait for smail to complete delivery before starting
a new one.   After writing the copy to the queue file, smail3
will attempt to malloc() message_buf_size (default = 100k) plus
the the work space for handling the alias, paths and forwarding
files, etc.  Several of these at once can swamp a small machine.

>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.

If you have background delivery set (smail forks after queuing
to continue delivery in a different process), change to foreground
or daemon mode.  Try setting the message_buf_size lower (or
increase the available resources if you are hitting a swap space
or per-user memory limit).  If you have HDB uucp, be sure your
Maxuuxqts is set to a low number.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us