Forum OpenACS Q&A: What happened the forum daily summary mail?

You can check your workspace to see if you are still subscribed to daily email alerts. I am but have not gotten any in the last few days so suspect that the something broke - code or mail server.

OpenACS has completely left my conscious mind over the past few weeks... because I still haven't been getting the daily mails! It's amazing how true the old adage "out of sight, out of mind" is. It was only when we were debating here in the office about what to do with our ticket tracker that I remembered that I was the OpenACS guy on the team and that I had fallen completely out of touch with developments on the project. Can somebody please help me figure out what's happening? The last daily summary I received was sent on Tuesday 27th November.

Well, I recieved a 332K digest only an hour ago, so I'd guess things
are back to normal.

What's happening is that watchdog's log parser (the toolkit's bin/aolserver-errors.pl script) gets itself into an infinite loop at times.  For some reason this locks out certain scripts.  It may be because AOLserver only allocates one thread for scheduled scripts like watchdog, digest building, cvs updating so the latter two scheduled jobs get blocked if watchdog loops forever (???? this is just a hypothesis as I don't know if this is how AOLserver handles scheduled jobs ????)

Anyone out there - Jerry Asher, maybe - know?

If someone wants to take a look at the script and fix it, several people will heap praise upon you.  It turns out that it doesn't only loop here at openacs.org at times, but on other sites, including ACS Classic 3.4 sites.  But so far the nuisance level of having to kill it off every few months has been less than the nuisance of trying to debug the Perl script, apparently.  Or if someone has fixed it they've not shared the fix with the community ...