From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 19 9:22:13 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 83BEE14DA5; Wed, 19 May 1999 09:22:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id LAA60181; Wed, 19 May 1999 11:22:03 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 11:22:02 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: Andre Rikkert de Koe Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: timeconsuming processes on FreeBSD 3.1 Message-ID: <19990519112202.A59883@dan.emsphone.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.5i In-Reply-To: ; from "Andre Rikkert de Koe" on Wed May 19 18:01:57 GMT 1999 X-OS: FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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