[Pan-users] pan HOGGING RESOURCES bug

[Jeff Vian]

I recently ran into a bug that caused me to have to hard kill pan

I inadvertently allowed the download dir to fill up with > 100 binary
messages being downloaded.

When I checked the system I found it was being hogged by pan and I could
do almost nothing at the keyboard.

The configuration was
     For the server being used -- 4 connections allowed

The symptoms were:
    There were over 40 messages that said 100% and the retries count was
steadily growing

    At times it indicated as many as 30 - 40 connections as it
repeatedly tried to decode the files from the cache to the destination
dir.

    It still had some of the connections dowloading correctly

    Pausing the queue from the task manager stopped the current
downloads but did not halt the attempts to decode the files that werre
blocked by the full filesystem. Pan continued merrily hogging all system
resources until I forcibly killed it.


SUGGESTION:
    Put something in the decode process that will halt the loop until
the problem has been resolved. I believe this will be useful in more
ways that with a blunder like mine.
    At present, if it is downloading and cannot do the decode it marks
the article as failed with 100% downloaded. This applies AFAIK to the
decode failing.  It also meeds to apply to a failure to write the
output.   

Note: I have my retries set to 200 because my primary server is
notoriously slow about dropping connections and with only 2 allowed
connections I often get periods of repeated attempts to restart when one
connection fails.

Jeff