Bug#377857: occasional SIGSEGV in exim4 under heavy load

[Marc Haber]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 02:12:38PM +0100, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> I've just had a try on another machine (different
> hardware, 2.6 kernel rather than 2.4) and it hasn't
> crashed in a few minutes' testing. Is it possible you've
> been testing on 2.6? I've also tried it on a third
> machine, identically configured to the second, but running
> 2.4, and the bug does exhibit there.

Yes, I am testing on a 2.6 kernel. I have not been running a 2.4
kernel in ages, and Debian etch will still support 2.4 kernel, but
only optionally.

So, if this is a kernel 2.4 issue, I'd like to close this bug or
reassign to the 2.4 kernel packages (if there are any left). Are you
running a Debian kernel, or did you roll your own?

> > Logging to a tmpfs didn't influence throughput here. Additionally,
> > having exim query a local caching resolver, the throughput didn't
> > change as well.
> 
> I'm very surprised by that -- logging to disk is very
> costly at high throughput.

Yes, I was surprised as well.

> It turns out (as expected, more-or-less) that you don't
> need to do any deliveries to trigger it; simply connecting
> and disconnecting is enough. The program below triggers
> the bug on the first machine rather more quickly than
> postal typically does.

Does it trigger the bug on the 2.6 kernel as well?

Greetings
Marc

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