manu's blog

Have you ever felt the power of space? When you feel that the space, just space around you, affects you strongly. Almost all of us have experienced it for short duration in some way or other, for example when we go to a temple. I felt it for a much longer duration. It happened to us when we visited Ladakh last month. By we, I mean Pankaj and I. For those who don't know, Pankaj and I are best buddies. So, we went to this land of peace and quiet. There are some obvious things that make Ladakh different from all other hill stations. Altitude so high that AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) comes to you easily, different kind of people, and proximity to both Pakistan and China borders. But, there are some things which are not easy to imagine. Things like how can it calm you beyond your imagination. We were very excited about this trip. We decided to go by Manali-Leh road and come back by air. Our route was something like: Hyderabad -> Delhi -> Chandigarh -> Manali -> Leh ->

In this post, I would like to talk about the recent fun I had with squid . It involved some troubleshooting and some hacking. Problem: Squid will stop responding after running for some random period of time, say 10 to 40 min and cpu usage will shoot up to 95-100%. I started with strace , but everything looked fine there. Then I tried ltrace and there I got the first clue. squid was comparing 2 strings in an infinite loop: strcmp("thumbnail.videoegg.com", "i12.ebaystatic.com") = -1 strcmp("thumbnail.videoegg.com", "i12.ebaystatic.com") = -1 strcmp("thumbnail.videoegg.com", "i12.ebaystatic.com") = -1 Looks like some bad 'for' loop. But, what part of code and why? It needed little more debugging to answer these questions. The squid binary that I was running was installed from a debian package and thus was stripped off debugging symbols. To fix that problem, I rebuilt the squid package with debugging information. On