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Date:      Fri, 29 Mar 1996 11:30:56 -0600 (CST)
From:      Guy Helmer <ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu>
To:        owensc <owensc@enc.edu>
Cc:        questions list FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: orphaned proccess hogging CPU (e.g. pine)
Message-ID:  <Pine.OSF.3.92.960329111941.2681B-100000@alpha.dsu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960329090246.4241A-100000@dingo.enc.edu>

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On Fri, 29 Mar 1996, owensc wrote:

> Hi,
> When users who telnet in to my FreeBSD server log of ungracefully (e.g.
> by killing their local telnet program) they occasionally leave orphaned
> process behind, despite the fact that I have -CLOCAL and HUPCL set when
> they log in.  Is there any thing else I should do to keep this from
> occurring?
>
> Sometimes these orphaned process don't just hang around but spin their
> wheels vigorously, chewing most available CPU time.  I had a problem with
> this in the past with the talk program, but lately I've been seeing it
> with the pine email front end.
>
> Is this CPU-chewing a result of a programming boo-boo in Pine itself?  Or
> is there something system-wide that I should tweak to fix this?  I don't
> mind digging through the source but could use a pointer or two.

Yes, there are a couple of problems in Pine 3.91 where it will hang in a
loop and eat CPU.  One well-known problem was in pine/ttyin.c, where it
would loop and look for incoming data from the terminal. Another of the
problems was particularly nasty: pine would set the signal handler for
SIGSEGV to SIG_IGN (ignore) as it was preparing to exit, and then a bug (I
hadn't taken the time to track down) made pine SIGSEGV over and over...  I
changed the relevant code in pine/signals.c to never ignore SIGSEGV or
SIGTERM.  I wasn't using the patches provided in the FreeBSD port of pine
3.91, so maybe those would have solved my SIGSEGV problem.

I haven't seen either of these problems in pine 3.92 (just released), but
I added my patch back into pine/signals.c just in case :-)  I'm not sure
if the FreeBSD port/mail/pine patches will apply to 3.92, though.

>   Charles Owens					 Email:  owensc@enc.edu

Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu




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