*BSD News Article 73080


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From: taob@zot.io.org (Brian Tao)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: "Illegal seek writing history file -- throttling"
Date: 7 Jul 1996 18:26:42 -0400
Organization: Internex Online Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <4rpdj2$88s@zot.io.org>
References: <4rk37e$4c8@zot.io.org> <slrn4ts8gg.71d.hwr@pilhuhn.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: zot.io.org
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au news.software.nntp:24176 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:23018

In article <slrn4ts8gg.71d.hwr@pilhuhn.de>, Heiko W.Rupp <hwr@pilhuhn.de> wrote:
>
>Try it without sharedactive. While the FreeBSD guys claim that their 
>mmap() is working, it comes over every half year that there are still 
>bugs in it. So this could be the same for shared memory.

    Okay, I take my previous statement back.  Rebuilding the history
file would be the *second* last thing I would want to do.  Backing out
sharedactive would be *the* last thing.  ;-)  I'm handling 150+
readers on a 128MB machine and memory exhaustion is not a concern.
Without sharedactive, I would need three times the RAM.  :(

    mmap() is not being used, and I've been running with sharedactive
since this particular server was put online last December and this is
the first time I've seen this particular error.  I know this doesn't
discount that there may be a bug in the shared memory routines, but it
would have to be an awfully subtle one.  According to errno(2),
"Invalid seek" is ESPIPE, which should only occur on an lseek() of a
socket, pipe or fifo.  My history file is clearly none of the above.  ;-)

    FWIW, the server has behaved nicely since the two throttling
incidents.  The following day's expire completed without a hitch, with
the history file correctly rewritten.  Thanks for your suggestions.
-- 
Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org, taob@ican.net)
Systems and Network Administrator, Internet Canada Corp.
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"