[Mailman-Users] The Mysterious Disappearing Disk Space (fwd)

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>	I have looked through the archives for something similar to my 
>issue, and I noticed that by searching on "disk full", I get similar 
>reports beginning in roughly July of 08.
>
>	As with these other reports, I have noticed *tremendous* 
>disappearing space.  When I tried to find the actual files, I was 
>unsuccessful.  Interestingly, if I stop mailman and then restart it, the 
>"missing" space miraculously reappears! 


Is this Solaris? If so, see the thread beginning at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-July/062359.html>
which is about an alleged memory leak.

If you're running out of disk, and restarting the processes solves it,
it may be swap space that's eating up the disk.


>	So, now that the background is over with, here's where I find 
>myself (besides just looking stupid):
>
>(1) Yesterday I enabled VERP, and it appeared to be working well,  At the 
>time I turned on VERP, I had around 5gb of free space (which would take 
>about two weeks to "disappear" before VERP).


5gb of free disk space doesn't seem like a lot these days.


>(2) Around 2pm today, the disk was full, and mailman died.


Enabling VERP might cause the MTA to use a lot more queue space, but I
don't see that it would affect Mailman much.


>(3) My inkling of something being wrong was this on the web interface:
>
>  "Bug in Mailman version 2.1.11rc2
>
>  We're sorry, we hit a bug!
>
>  Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of 
>  traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, 
>  but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs. "
>
>(4) Upon looking at the system in response to the above missive, I checked 
>and saw the system ws out of space again.  I did what I always do - shut 
>down mailman (which usually drops ~5gb of "missing" space, and then 
>restart it.  Everything before today has come up roses doing this.


So are you saying that this time you didn't recover any disk space or
just that the web error didn't go away. If the latter, it seems likely
that the disk space error caused a config.pck file to be corrupted and
that is the cause of the recurrent "bug". What is the traceback from
the most recent of these from the error log?


>(5) There is nothing in any of the logs that indicate why this message is 
>continuing to poke fun at me.


There almost certainly is something in Mailman's error log unless the
logfile just can't be grown to accommodate the message.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan