Geo Carncross wrote:
Nonetheless, "hung" processes are another deal: "hung" processes are the
result of broken code, or a broken design.
No more so than a program that crashes or a kernel that randomly kills
off processes.
The problem I've been pointing out is that processes can be killed for
any reason- and no amount of defensive programming in the program itself
can protect against those kills.
I still totally 100% disagree with this statement.
The only process guaranteed to be running is pid=1, aka init.
Not true, the kernel can crash too.
This whole thread, and your crusade against init.d really bothers me.
If init were really such a good answer why haven't all the really smart
people put distros together use it for more than a few simple processes
that are designed to exit and be restarted by init.
DBMail shouldn't crash, and it should be killed by the kernel if you
don't overcommit your memory. If DBMail still dies then as an admin I
want to know if something is wrong on my server and be able to figure it
out. If DBMail crashes too often, then I shouldn't be using it.
Personally, I find DBMail really stable enough, but I like it so I limp
along with it. I'm really looking forward to the 2.2 release so that I
can run it from xinetd, should make the whole system more stable.
Matt