pthreads and nagios issue

[Daniel Eischen]

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Christophe Yayon wrote:

> Hi,
>
> But is it a Nagios or FreeBSD problem, if you read "what's new" section on
> nagios site, you can see :
> -----------------
> FreeBSD and threads. On FreeBSD there's a native user-level implementation
> of threads called 'pthread' and there's also an optional ports collection
> 'linuxthreads' that uses kernel hooks. Some folks from Yahoo! have
> reported that using the pthread library causes Nagios to pause under heavy
> I/O load, causing some service check results to be lost. Switching to
> linuxthreads seems to help this problem, but not fix it. The lock happens
> in liblthread's __pthread_acquire() - it can't ever acquire the spinlock.
> It happens when the main thread forks to execute an active check. On the
> second fork to create the grandchild, the grandchild is created by fork,
> but never returns from liblthread's fork wrapper, because it's stuck in
> __pthread_acquire(). Maybe some FreeBSD users can help out with this
> problem.
> ------------------
> And it appears to be a FreeBSD pthread implementation problem (not a
> Nagios specific problem...)
> What do u think about that ?

Re-read what is written above.  __pthread_acquire() is in liblthread;
that is linuxthreads and not a POSIX function.  The reported FreeBSD
pthread problem above is a "pause under heavy I/O load...".  I'm not
sure what could cause that -- need more info.

-- 
DE