On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:31:34AM -0400, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> Is there a way to debug things like this and figure out what is
> causing the hang? Can I run something like ktrace on an already
> running process?

ktrace -p <pid>

does the trick nicely. 'ktrace -C' then stops tracing systemwide, a good
thing to have handy if tracing a process in an infinite loop :-)

Did you get a chance to do a 'top' or 'ps' to show it's actually a sqwebmail
process at fault?

> Can I somehow compile sqwebmail with
> debugging code so that I can trace the sqwebmail process when
> a CPU hog appears?

I don't think so, since I can't see how to distinguish 'CPU hog' from
'normal process doing a lot of work'. You can perhaps attach gdb to a
running process, but I've not got to that stage yet.

> I get sqwebmail CPU hogs every few days on my server, so I'd really
> like to figure out what the problem is. My box is a FreeBSD 4.8-
> RELEASE box. And I've been experiencing these sqwebmail hangs
> for months now. And I'm not even running FastCGI. :)

sqwebmail does fork some child processes: gzip, and the banner program if
you're using that.

You might like to try 'configure --without-gzip' and see if that helps. At
the moment I'm running sqwebmail configured with FastCGI (and therefore
without-gzip), but running it as a normal CGI because of the FastCGI
problems. I don't see any CPU hogs, and it's a moderately active server
(about 400K impressions yesterday, about 65K of which are CGI and the rest
are images/stylesheets)

Cheers,

Brian.

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