[Mailman-Users] Runaway python process

[Andy Cravens]

Dragon wrote:
> 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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Problem solved.   I already killed that qrunner process so that I could 
edit the archive options via the web interface.  The key was deleting 
the 25,000 files from qfiles/archive.  and then restarting mailman.  I 
probably deleted some other legit archives to other lists in the process 
but at least we're back up.   Probably should have done a selective 
delete by grepping for the list name within the file but oh well...

Thanks for pointing me to qfiles/archive.  I learned something.

--
Andy