Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!udel!princeton!pep
From: pep@princeton.Princeton.EDU (Pat Parseghian)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Strange Core Dumps
Message-ID: <7961@princeton.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 11 Dec 87 17:27:45 GMT
References: <2122@crash.cts.com>
Sender: news@princeton.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: pep@Princeton.EDU (Pat Parseghian)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University
Lines: 32

Your problem has a familiar ring . . .
Our mail/news gateway occasionally runs out of swap space and we haven't been
lucky enough to track it down.  It doesn't panic, it limps along - but it's
hard to get evidence when "ps" dumps core (Bus error) and utilities like "top"
and "systat" won't run (Not enough memory).

We're running 4.3BSD+NFS (Mt. Xinu) on a Microvax II.  We're running 2.11,
patch 14, but we've seen this with patch 8).  We went from patch 8 to patch 14
a week ago; whether we saw the problem prior to patch 8, I don't recall.  We
have 16 MB of memory and about the same amount of swap space.

What does your core dump suggest???

I'd like to supplement your observations:
- The offending articles are the only ones in my history file with a "%" in a
  Message-ID.
- One of the articles (<INFO-M2%87120818260493@UCF1VM>) has a References line
  that is not a valid Message-ID (to the best of my understanding).
- That particular article is still on my system as /usr/spool/news/.ar006603,
  which is linked to /usr/spool/news/comp/lang/modula2/576.

This last observation was most interesting to me, because:
- The article is in my history file.
- We sent the article successfully to our netnews neighbors (I found it in a
  spool directory on one of our neighboring machines, with a path indicating
  it came through us).
- So why didn't inews unlink /usr/spool/news/.ar006603?  Probably because it
  got hung before calling xxit().  The article arrived on our system around
  21:43 on 12/8; at 9:49 on 12/9 we ran out of memory/swap space.  At 10:42 I
  rebooted.  I'll bet that inews was running, but I can't confirm that.

Pat Parseghian, Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University, (609) 452-6261