Re: [webmin-l] /bin/sh -c (hostname)

[Craig W. <cra...@az...>]

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 18:48 +0100, Victor Trac wrote:
> A few weeks ago (I think after a webmin upgrade) I started noticing
> there were processes that were taking up 100% CPU time.  I took the
> output from top:
> 
> 21093 root      25   0  4436  588  452 R 99.3  0.0 698:00.55 sh
> 23993 root      25   0  4440  592  452 R 59.6  0.0 463:17.77 sh
> 21757 root      25   0  4436  592  452 R 41.7  0.0 761:26.08 sh
> 
> then:
> 
> mercury ~ # ps -f 21093; ps -f 23993; ps -f 21757
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     21093 21006 70 Dec11 ?        R    698:25 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     23993 23922 50 Dec11 ?        R    463:30 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     21757 21754 78 Dec11 ?        R    761:38 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
> mercury ~ # ps -f 21006; ps -f 23922; ps -f 21754
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     21006 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
> /usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     23922 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
> /usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     21754 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
> /usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
> mercury ~ # ps -f 18691
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     18691     1  0 Dec11 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/perl
> /usr/libexec/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf
> 
> I killed those offending processes, and remembered that earlier in the
> day I was reading my mail through webmin, and the search function was
> just stalling.  It would sit there a while but not actually return any
> results.  The very next day, I noticed it was happening again:
> 
> mercury ~ # ps -f 4080
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root      4080  4067 97 Dec12 ?        R    1104:56 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
> mercury ~ # ps -f 4067
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root      4067 18691  0 Dec12 ?        S      0:00
> /usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/view_mail.cgi
> mercury ~ # ps -f 18691
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> root     18691     1  0 Dec11 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/perl
> /usr/libexec/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf
> 
> Why is it running /bin/sh -c (hostname) and why is it hanging there at
> 100% CPU?  Has anyone experienced anything like this?  It seems as
> though a sh process spawns every other day or so, and is directly
> related to me using webmin to read my mail.  Any insight would be
> greatly appreciated, as right now I just have to log into the server
> every day and manually kill any sh processes.
----
It might be helpful to find out which processes are causing the race
conditions and I use top for that. In your case, it's possible that it
isn't the shell process but something occurring within the shell.

Craig