[ic] Should I buy another CPU?

Kyle Cook interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Mon Mar 18 22:04:01 2002


At 05:35 PM 3/18/02, you wrote:
> > From: interchange-users-admin@interchange.redhat.com
>[mailto:interchange-
> > users-admin@interchange.redhat.com] On Behalf Of John Beima
> >
><-- SNIP -->
> > One last thing you need to look at is drive speed and choices.... If
>you
> > are
> > experencing on and off failures in pgp encryption and/or payment
>gateways.
> > This
> > is more likely than not, your drives are too slow. These
>programs/modules
> > need
> > to make tmp files, they also need RAM, and if they can't get both fast
> > enough,
> > they fail. You will see this problem a lot on the list, if people
>actually
> > READ
> > past messsages, they would see it and STOP posting it again and again.
>
>This is obviously directed at me and others who experienced this
>problem.  Mike Heins and Orko from the list spent a considerable amount
>of time working with me on this issue and we found that it was not due
>to RAM or HD speed.  I posted before on this issue that we run U2W SCSI
>drives and have more then enough free ram for the one site that is being
>served.
>
>The problem being experienced is due to a bug in Perl's signal handling
>and can be fixed by using the applying the fix that Mike came up with
>(RPC mode, MaxServers 0).  If we would have stopped posting this problem
>to the list the first time it would have never been fixed.  I'm not sure
>why you are upset that this problem was posted to the list, but due to
>Mike wanting to get to the bottom of this and more then one person
>experiencing the problem a fix was found... and it was not to simply
>throw more hardware at the problem.
>
>-Ron

Occasional problems could be the result of insufficient resources
or the "perl signal handling bug".  If you don't see resource errors
in the system log files (not counting ic log files) then try rpc mode
with MaxServers set to 0.

For me this has solved the problem.


Just to clarify on settings to change IF you experience occasional
failures of external programs (sendmail,pgp,LockOut Command, etc)

interchange.cfg :

Variable  TRAFFIC  rpc


ifdef TRAFFIC =~ /rpc/i
Message RPC traffic settings.
PreFork             Yes
StartServers        5
MaxRequestsPerChild 25
HouseKeeping        2
PIDcheck            120
MaxServers          0
endif

NOTE: I changed MaxRequestsPerChild from
100 to 25 just because I saw previous posts
where there were some issues with this setting.
I don't know if there still are issues with this setting,
but I just wanted to be safe.

Kyle Cook