[TriLUG] logrotate misery

Jon Carnes jonc at nc.rr.com
Thu Feb 26 15:11:19 EST 2004


On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 13:40, Brian A. Henning wrote:
> Hi List,
>   Every few days, logrotate sends my system into a tizzy.  Sometimes it gets
> as bad as pushing the load average above 10, which has the side effect of
> causing sendmail to stop accepting connections.  I don't have huge amounts
> of logs (this past time, the rotated logs were only up to .3, and I've seen
> machines with much heavier log loads have no problems), so I'm not sure what
> could be causing logrotate to have these fits.  By the time I really begin
> to notice the system's lag, often logrotate has racked up several hours of
> CPU time.  I usually end up using killall to send SIGKILL to all logrotate
> processes.
>   I know there isn't much info here to help reach a diagnosis, but any
> guesses?  Samba also seems to have a bit of trouble; when I switch to tty1,
> especially if it's been a long time since I've actually used the console
> (rather than ssh), there will be a screenful of messages like:
> 
> smb_request: result = -104, setting invalid
> smb_retry: successful, new pid=17175, generation=285
> 
> Could that be related somehow?  It's always the same message, result = -104,
> setting invalid.
> 
> It's not really a huge deal I guess..  I could always take logrotate out of
> cron.daily if nothing else, but I don't necessarily wish to give up the
> function that logrotate performs.
> 
> Thanks for all ideas tossed my way.
> 
> Cheers,
> ~Brian

Check each of the directories that are being rotated and each of the
files.  Look for a directory with lots of files or a very, very large
file.

Jon




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