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Subject: Re: cleanup daemon won't die
From: Wietse Venema (wietseporcupine.org)
Date: Sun Apr 09 2000 - 12:55:39 CDT

Nate:
> At home I have a mail gateway that forwards (via the transport table) all
> mail to my domain to a machine on a private address. The gateway is an old
> 486 running debian linux (frozen).
>
> I was running 19991231-pl04 and for the last few days I would get cleanup
> processes that run for hours, sometimes 3 or 4 of them. They would all
> fight for the CPU and run the CPU load up to 4 or higher, slowing the
> machine to a crawl (relative term on a 486 ;)

About the only thing that would make cleanup go into a loop is a
bug in the RFC 822 address parser. And that hasn't happened as far
as I can remember.

If software suddenly starts misbehaving while there is no change
in usage patterns, and the hardware is a typical PC without any
memory error detection, then it is time to upgrade hardware.

        Wietse