[tpop3d-discuss] Apparent memory leak in 1.4.1pre4 under Solaris 8

Chris Lightfoot chris at ex-parrot.com
Tue, 19 Mar 2002 18:21:35 +0000


On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 05:11:41PM +0000, John P Connor wrote:
> At 23:00 18/03/2002, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> >On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 01:44:04PM +0000, John P Connor wrote:
    [...]
> >However, you may find that tpop3d/auth-perl leaks memory
> >even with this installed. This is a consequence of perl's
> >crummy garbage collection, and there's nothing tpop3d can
> >do about it, except perhaps restart the embedded perl
> >interpreter every so often. I'm not sure how serious a
> >problem this is on production systems.
> 
> It does indeed, though not to the same standard as before :-) Thanks very 
> much for the quick patch. We're now using tpop3d in a production 
> environment, supporting about 150,000 users, FYI.

Wow. That's a lot.

Have you set something up to restart it periodically, or
are you going to live with the memory leaks? I think that
having auth-perl shut down and restart the perl
interpreter every so often should help, though it's not
necessarily true that this will prevent the memory leak
altogether.

> We have used qpopper for years, but I needed a decent server to which it 
> was easy to add new authentication schemes to (we use Portal Infranet .. 
> you wouldn't like it .. *I* don't like it ;-)) and had support for both 
> maildir and mailbox, as we really needed to migrate to maildir so we can 
> reliably use network attached storage.

Hmm. A `convergent billing platform'. I don't know what
one of those is, but I imagine you're right: I don't think
I'd like it....

> Thanks for a really cool piece of software.

I'm glad you find it useful.

-- 
 Politicians are like nappies. They should be changed often,
 and for the same reason.