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Threading bug leading to zombies? / licq problems



Hello

I've problems running licq on my powerbook G3. Frequently it leaves zombies around until at 33 threads (including the zombies) it opens a dialog saying that it can't create new threads because of no resources being available. (Strangely, ulimit -u says 2560, and a perl test script can in fact create that many zombies, so the limit must be set somewhere else but I don't care now about that)

I'm noticing some other strange things on my machine:

chris@lombi chris > ps aux|grep ' Z '
chris    26793      0    0 ?        Z    Sep24   0:00 [nc <defunct>]
mysql    28948      0    0 ?        Z    06:25   0:00 [mysqld <defunct>]
mysql    28956      0    0 ?        Z    06:25   0:00 [mysqld <defunct>]
chris    23281      0    0 ?        Z    15:26   0:00 [netstat <defunct>]
(trimmed to fit the line width)

mysqld leaving zombies behind? That must be a bug on my system, it would be known pretty fast if that would be a mysql bug.

(netstat is forked off by galeon-bin (huh, what for?? but anyway) so that's probably only a bug of galeon)

I'm also seing segfaults of nedit since about the 7th of august. I've already reinstalled libmotif and recompiled/upgraded nedit without any change: every time it opens a dialog it crashes. I thought that maybe some library is damaged but I ran debsums and except libc6 which doesn't have md5sums everything seemed ok, and even after a recent libc6 security upgrade it's still happening (the nedit crash as well as the zombies).

So my hypothesises:

- libc6 might have a ppc dependent bug in thread handling.
- the kernel I'm running has a bug.

Has anyone else seen those problems?

Apart from the above problems my system is as stable as one could think, no crash or lockup for months. (BTW: I've complained some time ago about frequent X crashes. Since I've given the kernel more swap space, that never happened again - note that I already *had* at least 100MB of spare swap, X didn't make me run out of swap, *but* maybe X sometimes allocates some huge chunk of memory (>100MB) and, in spite of not being used subsequently, that maybe leads to an allocation error and X crash if the swap space isn't big enough.)

Thanks,
Christian.



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