Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!ames!amdahl!pyramid!prls!philabs!micomvax!musocs!zap!fortin From: fortin@zap.UUCP (Denis Fortin) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: --- Multiple UUXQTs causing thrashing --- Message-ID: <358@zap.UUCP> Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 23:24:32 EST Article-I.D.: zap.358 Posted: Wed Nov 18 23:24:32 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 23-Nov-87 04:08:22 EST References: <173@zap.UUCP> <8800@pyramid.pyramid.com> Reply-To: fortin@zap.UUCP (0000-Denis Fortin) Organization: (none), Montreal QC, Canada Lines: 59 Keywords: Unix, compress, LCK.XQT, thrashing Summary: Thanks! In article <8800@pyramid.pyramid.com> csg@pyramid.UUCP (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes: >In article <173@zap.UUCP> fortin@zap.UUCP (Denis Fortin) writes: >>A quick "ps -ef" informed me that no less than three UUXQTs were running on >>the system, each one with associated news-unpack, compress, etc. > >Ah yes, the Great Glacier News Flood. :-) > [...] >On a small machine (anything smaller than a 68020, apparently) it's not that >unusual for a single uncompress/unbatch/rnews run to take more than an hour. >So the lock gets swept away, and another uuxqt starts running the same job. > >You have the following solutions available: > >- Regularly touch /usr/spool/uucp/XQT.LCK from cron. [...] > Greetings... First of all, I'd like to thank all of the news.admin readers who responded to my inquiry about multiple UUXQTs running on my System V machine (including Dave@arnold, rbl@nitrex, lyndon@ncc, tanner@ki4pv, jerry@oliveb.atc.olivetti.com, steve@mahendo.jpl.nasa.gov, root@investor, lindsay@dscatl, jane@tolerant, david@ms.uky.edu, etc). Basically, the consensus is that with "old" UUCPs (including System V Rel.2), the "LCK.XQT" file in /usr/spool/uucp is considered "old" (and therefore ignored) after about 60 minutes (or is that 30?). Anyway, various solutions were proposed, including: * touching LCK.XQT every once in a while, * obtaining HDB UUCP (maybe when I get info on the Microport System V/AT 2.2 to 2.3 upgrade, there will be some information in there on obtaining HDB UUCP?!?) * using the "SPOOLNEWS" feature. Now, having very little time to play with this, I chose the easy solution and simply added a 27 * * * * touch -c /usr/spool/uucp/LCK.XQT in the crontab entry for user uucp. I know that this might cause problems if a UUXQT *really* died, but so far this hasn't happened. (Somebody *did* send me a nice script that checks whether or not UUXQT is still executing before doing the "touch"... It's on my list of things to install!) So far, this has worked *remarkably well* and my system unpacks news very happily (now if I could just find the time to recode parts of "compress" in assembler in order to speed it up a bit, my machine might not be unpacking stuff from 0:00 to 13:00!!!). Thanks again... -- Denis Fortin, | fortin@zap.UUCP CAE Electronics Ltd | rutgers!mit-eddie!musocs!zap!fortin The opinions expressed above are my own | fortin%zap.uucp@uunet.uu.net