Holger Diehm iS-Fun Internet Services GmbH wrote on Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:30:06 +0200:
Doing it via useradd the system CPU and RAM bloats up. cancelling with ctrl-c does not work. killing via killal doesnt work too.
I reported a similar problem years ago to Suse. Your strace looks quite a bit like this. If I remember it right, it were certain programs (most notably ipop3d) that showed this behavior after the system hit a certain number of users (70 or so). I don't remember if useradd itself was behaving the same, but it was the ultimate cause of the problem. It happens because Suse 9.0 (and later?) adds new users to some groups by default (audio, video, uucp or so). After a while the line for these groups in /etc/group gets so long that it doesn't seem to fit in a buffer used by a library these programs use. They grab more and more memory while trying to cope with the situation. If you are fast enough you can kill the process, otherwise the machine ultimately gets killed. The problem does not occur when nscd is running. In that case these applications seem to "outsource" the authentication process and thus the problem is avoided. Besides using nscd it can also be cured by removing that insanely long user line from /etc/group and telling useradd to not add users to these groups automatically (/etc/default/useradd ? or so, I don't remember exactly). Kai -- Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany Get your web at Conactive Internet Services: http://www.conactive.com IE-Center: http://ie5.de & http://msie.winware.org