Bug#396835: tetex-bin postinst take unlimited amount of time and ram (kpsewhich took 600M and 14h)

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Hi Marcin,

the BTS server seems to be overloaded again, so this mail only reached
me directly, not through the maintainer list - which means that no one
else is able to comment on it yet.  What a pity.

Marcin Juszkiewicz <debbugs@hrw.one.pl> wrote:

> Dnia piątek, 3 listopada 2006 11:47, Frank Küster napisał:
>
>> If that happens again, please send the output of "ps axf".  One thing is
>> different to the older bug, though:  Back then, it wasn't possible to
>> stop it with Ctrl-C.
>
> I rebooted machine since then and did 'apt-get remove tex-common tetex*' to
> get clean situation. After few hours I have:
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  3268 root      25   0  641m 614m  432 R 93.5 48.6 150:56.82 kpsewhich
>
> ps afx tree:
>
>   PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
>  2077 ?        Ss     0:01 kdeinit Running...                                          
>  2203 ?        S      2:48  \_ konsole [kdeinit]                                           
> 29185 pts/12   Ss     0:00  |   \_ /bin/bash
> 29215 pts/12   S      0:00  |   |   \_ bash
>   460 pts/12   Sl+    0:05  |   |       \_ aptitude install openembedded-essential
>  1354 pts/12   S+     0:00  |   |           \_ /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 17 --configure libkpathsea4 tex-common tetex-base tetex-bin texinfo sgml-base xml-core sgml-data docbook libosp5 libostyle1c2 openjade docbook-dsssl tetex-extra tipa jadetex libsgmls-perl sgmlspl docbook-utils openembedded-essential
>  1975 pts/12   S+     0:00  |   |               \_ /bin/sh -e /var/lib/dpkg/info/tetex-base.postinst configure 
>  3268 pts/12   R+   147:15  |   |                   \_ kpsewhich --format=web2c files fmtutil.cnf
>
> 'openembedded-essential' is metapackage:

Am I right that there was no parallel running of tetex-bin's configure
script, as in the first listing?  Then I guess we can forget this, it
was just an other hanging script that was left over from a previous
run.  And it is just the kpsewhich call in tetex-base's postinst script
that hangs.

> 15:52 hrw@work:hrw$ ls /tmp/ -a
> .               gconfd-hrw   index.html?sm_command=build    ksocket-hrw  orbit-root      v995212
> ..              gconfd-root  index.html?sm_command=build.1  mc-hrw       ssh-UvPBQF1982  vmware-hrw
> album_info.xml  gpg-eIVKXi   kde-hrw                        mc-root      test            .X0-lock
> aptitudeEwiQYu  .ICE-unix    kde-hrw~                       orbit-hrw    v920934         .X11-unix

nothing tetex'ish yet.

Can you try to call kpsewhich directly while it is hanging, like this:

kpsewhich -debug=126 --format='web2c files' fmtutil.cnf 2>&1 | tee kpsewhich.log

I guess you will have to kill that process, because it will hang, too.
Then send us the log file, or better copy the log file before you kill
it and send us this version.  Maybe even

strace -o kpsewhich.trace kpsewhich --format='web2c files' fmtutil.cnf

and the resulting file kpsewhich.trace would be needed.

Many thanks in advance,
Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)