External Authentication program problem

[Fajar A. Nugraha]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Ali Majdzadeh <ali.majdzadeh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also plz note that auth.pl forks another exec program per authenticated user
> (named calc) and will live till user stopped. So if I’ve 20.000 online
> users, I’ve also 20.000 calc process.

The most obvious question is "why"?
What happens if a user is never marked offline (e.g. acct-stop packet
lost in network). Would that process keeps on living indefinitely?
Seems like a design bug to me. There's probably a better solution for
that if you can explain what the "calc" program does.

> It works for about 20.000 online user and after this threshold, it stops!

>
> What is ur recommendation?

Well, first of all, I'd actually recommend using 64bit OS (or at least
64bit kernel) if possible. My last experince with PAE was not so
great.

Second, what is "top" output (or better yet, htop) when you experience
the error? Is some process (radiusd, perhaps) using close to 4GB
virtual address space?

Third, what does "ulimit -a" show? Might be that the limit is not
memory at all, but open files or max user process.

-- 
Fajar