[Mailman-Users] Runaway python process

[Dragon]

Andy Cravens wrote:
>I'm running Mailman 2.1.9 on Solaris 10.  Sometime this weekend we 
>had a mail loop which pounded our list server.  The mail loop has 
>been fixed but there is a python process that is consuming an entire 
>cpu.  Further inspection of this process reveals:
>
>qrunner --runner=ArchRunner:0:1 -s
>
>I'm assuming that ArchRunner is a process that archives incoming 
>messages and that mailman is in the process of archiving all those 
>thousands of messages that were received due to the mail loop.
>I've been searching the mailman site and also googling to find a way 
>to discard all those bogus messages.  I'm getting pressure to fix this
>fast because people cannot log in to the web interface because the 
>server is pegged due to this process.
>
>So, 1)  I'd like to know if I'm going down the right path assuming 
>mailman is busy archiving all those messages and 2)  How can I get it to stop?
>
>I'm going to log into the web interface even though it will forever 
>to get the page to come up and I will try disabling archiving fir 
>the affected list.  Not sure if that will stop the archiving that is 
>already happening or not but I'm going to give it a try.
---------------- End original message. ---------------------

I'd suggest killing the archive runner process. And then disabling 
archiving in the web interface. Then you can go in and remove the 
offending files from qfiles/archive (though exactly what needs to be 
done there I am not certain).

You probably also want to remove the offending messages from the mbox 
files for the lists and then rebuild the archives without them, 
though there are issues with possibly breaking links to messages in 
the archives.

Once you have things cleaned up, you can restart mailman and 
re-enable archiving.

Dragon

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