mikas blog

No, that’s not a joke. Today I had to (hard-)reboot one of my servers because the console newsreader slrn produced such a high load on the system that it was everything but responsive as a consequence.

Huh. What? Yes, right. It was the fault of slrn. I had not set up any default limits on the server yet (stupid, me) but finally I could find and reproduce the source of the problem under the control of pam-limits.

What was going on? slrn failed at processing a message on gmane.linux.debian.user.german. It always hang at the same message. Via setting ‘limit addressspace 62000’ and therefore causing slrn to fail with ‘Memory allocation failure.’ instead of requesting more and more resources I could find the origin of the problem: slrn fails to parse the X-Face header in my UTF8 enabled setup. *gna* Looks like I’ve to investigate on that in further detail… In the mean time I set up limits and a monitoring system…

This entry was posted by mika on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 00:33 and is filed under Computer, Debian, English, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.