Entry

What does "lost spawn connection" mean?

Mar 16th, 2000 07:58
Dave Sill,

This usually means qmail-lspawn or qmail-rspawn has died, which causes
qmail-send to exit. The spawn processes are exceedingly reliable, so if
one of them has gone away, it probably means something like:
    o some idiot killed it (fix: clue the idiot)
    o the OS killed it because it ran out of memory (fix: switch
      to eager swap allocation)
    o some OS/library bug caused it to crash (fix: install a patch)
If you run qmail under supervise, it will automatically be restarted.
You should still try to find and fix whatever is causing the processes
to die.
To debug this problem, you could replace qmail-rspawn and qmail-lspawn
with wrappers that run the real binaries under trace/strace/truss/par,
or you can attach to the running processes with a debugger.
One obvious question to ask, assuming this problem cropped up after a
period of normal operation, is "what had I changed around the time it
broke?"