90-100% Cpu Use, Simple edit causes CPU use to go up?

Hi,

Everything ran well for 3 months. And then I received approval from spamhaus.org so that I can SEND mail to certain spamhaus.org organizations (aol.com, rr.com, earthlink.com, mindspring.*, et al.).

It was late one night and I changed something. I did not notice the CPU use had gone up until a couple days later when the machine seemed sluggish. Now everytime I start the server, the processor use jumps up, slowing down the rest of the machine.

I'm at a loss at a moment. I thought I changed what I changed back to what it was previously, but I can not be too sure of that.

Anyone able to suggest anything?

Thank you.

JC

In the past I've seen this happen with a incurrent "TAB" or line ending in a config file. What OS and program did u use to edit the files ?

Windows XP for the Operating System.

SciTE, by default SciTE uses LF instead CRLF. But if the file started with CRLF, it stays with CRLF, unless I manually change it. 0-length files contain nothing, so editing a 0-length file uses LF as the line end character.

Hmmm. It's something to check. Thanks.

Happy Sabbath to you.

Maybe I missed something, but I did find one file with LF lines, while all the rest had CRLF.

This is for the individual that takes of the documentation. The following, I believe, represents a bug in the documentation, regarding line-terminations:

xmail125.htm#miscellaneous

Firstly, a line-termination character aptly gets designated as a line-termination character, but officially gets known as a line break or a newline or a linefeed character (sequence). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linefeed

Second, the documentation misidentifies which OS employs which line-break. Mac/Commodore get a CR newline, Unix systems typically get the LF newline and the Microsoft systems commonly but no longer always employ the CRLF sequence.

Commodore... do you know what a Commodore is? I feel like one of those OLD wizards with a pointed purple wizard hat (when I ask that question)... I'm not that old.

I modified the help documentation line with the problem if anyone wants to update it. Changes include a change from passive voice to active voice and correctly identifying the newline characters employed by the OS.

<li><p>The main cause of bugs with XMail occurs due to bad line termination in configuration files, so check that all the lines in the configuration files get <i>correctly terminated</i> for the OS. Linux systems use &lt;LF&gt;, while M$ employ &lt;CRLF&gt; and Mac systems use &lt;CR&gt; to terminate lines.</p></li>

Don't take this the wrong way, but the OS definition of a line break (new line) has nothing to do with the what a app/script/etc thinks/wants or uses as it's line break (new line). Like in the case of XMail it wants all files to use "TAB"s windows version line breaks (new line).

Thanks for the reply, Chris. I'm pretty sure it's not a linefeed/line break. And I'm pretty sure it's not a TAB. Those are easy things to catch. Although I did not check for two-consequetive TABs, yet.

I think I modified a file that expected a number and I placed it in quotes.

I placed the userdef.tab file under the PM button. We can test this board out in the meantime while I look for an original file. I have a feeling that David did not encode a "reader" function for reading both things in quotation marks and things out of quotation marks and that may be where my problem is.

I keep a bad habit of correcting such things. Bad habit, but I remember looking at a number in one of these files and seeing it out of quotation marks. It tickled me and perhaps I went too far and automatically corrected it, as other numbers appeared in quotation marks.

And C/C++ does not assemble/compile like other languages (Perl/PHP/VB). In fact, it's only half a step above a macro assembly language.

Thanks twice.

Also if all else fails check the spool dir. A corrupt "spool file" (email). can cause xmail to go crazy (100% cpu). Now I haven't seen one of these since 1.21, but then again thats about the same time I started working with copies of spooled files instead of the real deal. But even with out filters I could easily see a file getting corrupt (even happens more times then I'd like using qmail).

You would not happen to know of anything that could hook into a "service" and show which API were getting called, would you?

I tried the API Monitor at Rohitab's website, very nice product, works great on XP and 2K, but it only works well for regular applications, and NOT applications that run as a service.

http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor/

I might have corrupted the "spool" (?) when I tried that as XMail went into stall and I ended up using task manager to kill it.

No one suggested API Monitor to me. I ran it in the past for a variety of things, like identifying which API caused an application to crash. I failed to read the documentation this last time and missed out on the warnings that it sometimes causes "services" to fault/crash/hang. So I can NOT recommend using it to start and monitor, NOR hook into an already running service and monitor, XMail.

Can I delete the whole SPOOL folder? Will XMail recreate it?

Thats a good Question, in the past I just did a find all **files** and deleted them that way. So to be honest... I don't know.

Before anyone answered, I deleted everything in the SPOOL folder. When I restarted XMail, XMail recreated those folders (numbered 1 to 22), then the subfolders too.

A corrupt SPOOL folder/file did NOT cure/fix the problem. SO...

I'm back to searching for which file I edited.

I convinced myself that I edited one of the .tab files and induced the problem myself. I hoped for a simple way out of this, but time to start digging and comparing the files with the originals.

Thanks for your reply, help and suggestions.

Might I suggest restarting from scratch and using XMail Manager to setup settings ?

http://www.encenia.com/filelib/xmailmgr/xmgr13.exe

I tried the xmgr13.exe. I could not get it to run properly. Probably the firewalls that're blocking it. Tight rules as far as the firewalls go.

Do you know if the source code is available for that? Or do you know who wrote it? I've already uninstalled it and prefer using software that comes with source code, no installer.

Installers tend to cause problems because they hide things during the install.

Thanks once again.

--
Jim Carlock

Well, I was getting ready to delete all the tabs. And I decided to go through the tabs one last and final time.

And I do not know how I missed this ALL the other times, but the last tab I worked on, was the smtp.ipmap.tab.

I thought I commented everything out, but I left each line starting with a blank space.

Wow.

Now, let me ask you folks if this looks ok for my smtp.ipmap.tab.

"0.0.0.0" "0.0.0.0" "DENY" "1"
"127.0.0.1" "255.255.255.255" "ALLOW" "2"
"xx.yyy.zzz.nn" "255.255.255.255" "ALLOW" "3"

where xx.yyy.zzz.nn represents the IP address of the network card in question.

Thank you for everyone's help. I greatly appreciate it.

--
Jim Carlock
MicroCosmoTalk
jcarlock at _.com