In the last 24 hours I've been seeing the load and CPU on my Piler
system get out of control. I'm finding one or more processes owned by
the piler user with the command "unrtf" that is pegging the CPU.

The man page says this a converter for Rich Text Format. I would guess
that perhaps piler is decoding attachments so they can be searchable.

That's all well and good, but how to I track down these messages that
unrtf is choking on? And then what do I do with them?

The ps command shows me this:

/usr/bin/unrtf --text 400000005542367a08ccec0c00f0dee541ab.a1.bin

I can kill the process, but eventually the problem returns.

Is piler returning to finish up the message from the killed process,
or do we have a series of problematic attachments coming in?

I am suspicious of a new contact of mine that is sending mail with the
dreaded winmail.dat attachments. I've given her info on how to stop
it, but she may not cooperate. It's not something I've seen much of
lately, maybe she has a really old Outlook version. In any case,
that's just my guess at the root of this issue.

Full disclosure: The piler store folder is on NFS, which sometimes
gives us trouble, but this particular issue is a new one. I've been
running piler for a year or more.

Piler version is 1.1.0.

Thanks,

Jeff

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