Description of problem: Yesterday we noticed that in one of our servers odbcsql command was just hanging. Stracing the offending process I found that it was constantly calling the times system call times(NULL) and getting a negative value. The process was not failing a few days back and the system was up for around 212 days , so we rebooted it and then odbcsql ran successfully. I tried to find any known issues or bug but could not find any. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant) uname -a Linux sc-sbl8app-d1 2.6.9-55.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Apr 20 16:36:54 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux How reproducible: Probably if the system date is changed and thereby uptime is increased to +200 then it may be reproducible. Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Created attachment 313130 [details] Strace of failed and successful odbcsql commands
Only (clock_t) -1 is special return value, saying the call failed, all other values, both positive and negative, are valid and just fine. So if the odbcsql process hangs because of this, it is broken.
Under what conditon can times(NULL) return a -ve value? Just curious because I could not find any more details on this.