> hangs in an uninterruptible sleep.

What does this mean ? A sleep() call needs to specify a time, so it
can't "hang".

Moreover, AFAIK, a user land process only can do uninterruptible sleep
(a very short nanosleep() ), if it is assigned very special attributes.

Is it possible that the process waits for some hardware event that does
not occur due to defective hardware ?

-Michael

Captain Dondo wrote:
> The frustrating thing is that it happens rarely; the process runs every 15
> minutes and sometimes it will run for days just fine, and then it will
> start hanging.
>
> Is there some way to find out where the process is hung after it is hung
> up?

Try to use "strace". When it hangs connect to it with "strace -p " and
you will see where it hangs (if it hangs in a system call). If this does
not help, try with "ltrace" instead.

Hope it helps
Juergen

Hello,

> This process runs every 15 minutes; and most of the time it will run just
> fine, but once in a while, it hangs. Then cron runs it again, and it
> hangs again. Pretty soon I have a bunch of hung processes that consume
> all resources, and for all practical purposes my little system is dead.

Your cronjob could kill all running instances before starting a new one.
That way the ressources would stay free and the system won't get problems.
It is not a clean solution, but at least it can keep your ressources free.
You could log if any instances are killed (instead of a clean exit) and
maybe find some event which causes the program to hang.

> have 3 weeks to get this up and running, and that doesn't give me much
> time....

That's an idea, but it will only help against the ressource leak of hung
processes, not against the problem.

I'd guess the program waits for something (a camera's event?), but never
gets it.

Regards,
Sebastian

On Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:19:57 +0200, Michael Schnell wrote:

>> hangs in an uninterruptible sleep.
>
> What does this mean ? A sleep() call needs to specify a time, so it
> can't "hang".
>
> Moreover, AFAIK, a user land process only can do uninterruptible sleep
> (a very short nanosleep() ), if it is assigned very special attributes.
>
> Is it possible that the process waits for some hardware event that does
> not occur due to defective hardware ?
>
> -Michael

From 'man ps':

PROCESS STATE CODES
Here are the different values that the s, stat and state output
specifiers (header "STAT" or "S") will display to describe the state of
a process.
D Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)

These processes show up as 'D', which means they cannot be killed.

I am guessing that thse processes are waiting for some camera event that
never occurs, but I have not figured out why only sometimes....

The camera shares the USB bus with a GPS, which is being polled almost
continously. I suspect there is some bus contention which triggers this,
but I have no idea where to start looking; all of the code I've looked at
looks OK so far.

--Yan

--
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Yan Seiner, PE (_)\(_) ,>/'_ o__
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