followup: stuck lmtpd processes

[Rob Siemborski]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Andrew Morgan wrote:

> I think your patch would fix the problem where are lot of processes are
> contending for a lock (by making them retry), but it wouldn't help if a
> single process keeps the lock indefinately.

I agree.  The whole act of retrying for a lock is pretty silly, when you
think about it.  The kernel is responsible for waking processes up when
they are blocking on a lock and it becomes available.  If this isn't
happening (causing the need to do locks in a nonblocking fashion) then
something is wrong with the *kernel* not the application.

The exponential backoff is pretty silly from a performance standpoint as
well.

The bug where the quota file stays locked is something else entirely.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper