[arch-general] pacman seems to leak ftp connections

[Alexander Duscheleit]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:21:01 +1000
"Allan McRae" <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On 18/08/10 12:07, Alexander Duscheleit wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > since I upgraded to pacman 3.4.0 I notice a strange behavior in the
> > way pacman integrates with my local mirror server. First, pacman
> > opens a new ftp connection for every download, which spams the logs
> > a lot. Second, pacman doesn't seem to close those connections
> > either at all, or at least not in a timely fashion. This results in
> > pacman not being able to download more than a hand full of packages
> > before my ftp won't let it connect anymore. The server-log says:
> >
> > Aug 18 00:42:38 titan proftpd[4666]:
> > titan.huntemann.uni-oldenburg.de - MaxInstances (30) reached, new
> > connection denied
> >
> > over and over while pacman switches to the next mirror for every
> > download.
> >
> > The pacman frontend clyde exhibits the same behavior, so I suspect
> > the culprit is somewhere in libalpm. Pacman prior to 3.4.0 did not
> > show this behavior and all downloads worked fine.
> >
> 
> This bug has been reported: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20371

Great, seems I should remember to actually set the right project in
FS :(

> 
> However, no-one appears to have investigated whether this was 
> libarchive's fault or libalpm's.

How would I best go about researching this? I have all the components
right here, and it's easy enough to trigger, but I have no experience
whatsoever in debugging libraries or C code in general.

I could try and set up a chroot to bisect pacman /
lib{fetch,archive,alpm} but I have no clue how good or bad random
pacman versions interact with the rest of the system.