Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 19 May 1999 11:22:02 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        Andre Rikkert de Koe <arikkert@surf.IAE.nl>
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: timeconsuming processes on FreeBSD 3.1
Message-ID:  <19990519112202.A59883@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96.990519174343.9943D-100000@surf.IAE.nl>; from "Andre Rikkert de Koe" on Wed May 19 18:01:57 GMT 1999
References:  <Pine.NEB.3.96.990519174343.9943D-100000@surf.IAE.nl>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In the last episode (May 19), Andre Rikkert de Koe said:
> We are an ISP and we recently installed FreeBSD 3.1 on our main
> logonserver. Since than almost every day we find timeconsuming
> processes running while the user isn't even logged in (anymore).
> These programs are mostly tin and lynx and such interactive programs.
> We are sure that they were started to run in foreground. However in
> the top-example "brouwert" was not logged in at that moment. Only
> thing we can do is to kill the proces.
>  
> Does anyone has a clue what's the cause of this ?

It's usually due to a bug in the application.  When a user exits, the
stdin/stdout filedescriptors on any backgrounded processes go away. 
That makes any read() calls return with an error.  If the application
doesn't check the return value of its read(), it can go into a tight
loop it'll never exit.

You can check to see if this is the problem by running truss -p 39448 .
Check to see if it's doing the same read() or write() over and over.

Tin used to have this bug, but I thought it was fixed long ago.  Lynx
shoudln't have any problems either. 

	-Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990519112202.A59883>