asterisk users - Feb 2007 - Run-away Asterisk

After testing some AGI's, I noticed several extra Asterisk processes.  They 
are not zombies, but can't be killed by safe_asterisk.  Nor will they die 
when CLI issues stop now.  Then I read that each AGI spawns a separate 
Asterisk process.  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.)

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.

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?

Thank you.

Yuan Liu

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.

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