Re: [hylafax-users] sendfax sometimes hangs, can't identify protocol?

[Mark Hunting <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks you very much for your answer!
Before I read it I found these 'interesting' lines in syslog, just 
before the error messages I sent in my previous mail:

May  8 11:42:36 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: SUBMIT JOB clien
May  8 11:42:36 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: JOB clien: qfile sendq/qclien 
is not a regular file.
May  8 11:42:36 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: Bad FIFO cmd 't' from client /26876
May  8 11:42:36 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: HylaClient::send: /26876: 
Cannot open FIFO: No such file or directory
and
May  8 12:03:53 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: SUBMIT JOB clie
May  8 12:03:53 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: JOB clie: qfile sendq/qclie is 
not a regular file.
May  8 12:03:53 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: Bad FIFO cmd 'n' from client t/8694

I t look like this confirms the problem you described :-)

I will increase the FIFO buffer like you said, that should be easy. 
After that I will probably try the CVS version. Thank you so much, I'm 
very glad I now know what causes my problems.

Mark

Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> * Mark Hunting <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> [070508 09:50]:
>   
> > Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> >     
> > > Hm.. if sendfax and faxstat are the *only* clients you use, then the
> > > trigger bug doesn't sound likely.  Are there any faxq messages in syslog
> > > about "Bad fifo message" or something like that?
> > >       
>
>   
> > Bingo. There is indeed some very usefull information in syslog (I 
> > think). Two sendfax processes I had to kill today were process ID's 
> > 26875 (the example from my previous mail), and 8693. In syslog there are 
> > lots of FIFO errors, but what surprises me are these lines:
> >     
>  
>   
> > The numbers here are the killed sendfax ID's + 1. The times are indeed 
> > the times on which the hanging sendfax processes were started. Do you 
> > know what this all means?
> > Here is the contect of the two lines:
> >     
>
> This is an artifact of faxq being "too busy".  The new scheduler in
> current CVS should really help you here.   "Too busy" means that it
> spends so much time working the sendq jobs that the FIFO buffer fills up
> before it can get back to it.  When the FIFO buffer fills up, it starts
> to read partial messages (like you posted).  When those "partial messages" it
> reads are the sendfax/hfaxd job submission ones, the hfaxd will wait
> forever for the response, because faxq didn't get the actuall message
> hfaxd wrote to the FIFO.
>
> There are a few ways you can compensate for this:
> 1) submit jobs more slowly
> 2) Submit all the jobs "in the future".  This will allow all the jobs
>    to be submitted before faxq "get's too busy"
> 3) "expand the fifo buffer" in faxd/faxApp.c++ - look for the code in:
> 	faxApp::FIFOInput(int fd)
>     and set the buf[2048] to somethig like buf[4096] or buf[8192].  This
>     won't "fix" the problem but may mean that there are longer periods
>     faxq can go before teh buffer is "full", and hopefully it will get a
>     chance to catch up before it's full.
>
>   
> > I had to do a grep -v 'not found' because my syslog file contains a huge 
> > amount of lines like
> >
> > May  8 09:23:15 caracas FaxQueuer[3699]: FIFO: JOB 27891 not found for 
> > msg "D22,1,212029,000034734,"docq/doc27933.pdf;01""
> >     
>
> This is again an artifact of faxq being "too busy".  Basically, the job
> has finished and faxq has already handled the child faxsend exit (so the
> job has been removed) before it get's around to handling the status
> message from the FIFO.
>
>   
> > I don't know what that means, but apparently it's not important. I never 
> > experience problems form them.
> >     
> > > Well, you're in luck.  You can build debian packages right from CVS:
> > > 	http://cvs.hylafax.org/HylaFAX/?p=HylaFAX;a=commit;h=909cfff8fd757586cfdcf5f47092e7afab7712ae
> > >       
>
> One note - if you're building a debian package from cvs/git:
>
> In debian/patches/00list, comment out patch 670 (doesn't apply anymore to
> current CVS), and build you packages like so:
> 	fakeroot make -f debian/rules binary
>
>
>   

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