Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:57:04 +0000 From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> To: lachlan@lkla.org Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Memory Error using Mailman on FreeBSD. How to debug? Message-ID: <47A9BCB0.8020309@dial.pipex.com> In-Reply-To: <28742.137.153.0.25.1202301936.squirrel@sm.lkla.org> References: <1153.137.153.0.37.1202210274.squirrel@sm.lkla.org> <69739C80-0639-4808-B5EB-0D9553826559@dpcsys.com> <30396.137.153.0.36.1202264253.squirrel@sm.lkla.org> <47A99B4E.1080707@dial.pipex.com> <28742.137.153.0.25.1202301936.squirrel@sm.lkla.org>
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Lachlan Michael wrote:
>>How big does the mailman process actually get? top will tell you.
>>
>>
>
>Mailman values don't budge. None of the mailman processes go over about
>8.5M, which is what they are during idle time.
>
>
Real puzzler. I'm surprised not to have at least one process growing,
though. Maybe it's not using much CPU and you're not spotting it.
Try running top, then sorting on size (o size inside top) then try your
mailman email again. Make sure the top refresh rate is fast enough. s
1 inside top would do that, or even s 0 if desperate.
Other things to try: Up the stack size
ulimit -s 262144
inside the mailman startup. Again, I've had processes in the past which
needed this.
You'd have to check that from a shell (/bin/sh) and first to see that
your system will allow a bigger value. If not, I believe that there is
a sysctl to do that these days but don't have a modern enough system to
look it up. A search for MAXSSIZ on google or mail archives may turn it
up - that's the kernel option but requires a recompile.
Of course, limits may not be the issue at all. They are a likely
suspect given your error message, but maybe it's worth checking other
bits of the mail system. Can you email a file of the size your are
trying not through mailman? Maybe your MTA (sendmail/postfix etc) has a
limit that somehow causes mailman to get this error.
The final suggestion is to try to trace (ktrace, strace from ports) the
process that is dying, but I suspect mailman forks a new process to deal
with the email so how you catch it, I don't know. Many demons have a
"run in foreground without forking" option which can be helpful to
debugging, but I don't know if anything like that is possible in
mailman. If you can figure out what mailman actually runs to process
the email, you could ktrace that from the command line. Maybe the
mailman mailing list could give you an incantation to try.
--Alex
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