[asterisk-users] Run-away Asterisk

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 10:56:14AM -0800, Yuan LIU wrote:
> After testing some AGI's, I noticed several extra Asterisk processes.  

An agi script is run by the same user running asterisk, but is not
"asterisk": it is a different program. What is the command name on those
scripts?

> They 
> are not zombies, but can't be killed by safe_asterisk.  

safe_asterisk attempts (poorly) to guard asterisk. Not really to guard
all of its child processes.

> Nor will they die 
> when CLI issues stop now.  Then I read that each AGI spawns a separate 
> Asterisk process.  

Huh? AGI? FastAGI? 

> But all my AGI calls have apparently completed 
> successfully.  So there should be no reason for them to hang there.
> 
> Several questions:
> 
> 1) Under what conditions will an AGI hang a process? (My test scripts are 
> pretty simple, almost directly derived from agi-test.agi.)

An AGI may be an arbitrary subprocess. This subprocess can do basically
everything. If it really wants to, (or if it misbehaves in the "right"
way) it won't die.

> 
> 2) How to detect run-away processes under 2.4 kernels?  In this kernel, 
> each thread clusters process space and it's very difficult to distinguish 
> them without killing the main process.

hmm, please attach the output of:

ps auxww | grep asterisk

> 
> 3) Any practical way to detect them from inside Asterisk - e.g., do some 
> check after each AGI call?  All my AGISTATUS reports success.  I could use 
> System() but isn't that cumbersome?

Write/use better code, I guess.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen       
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