Subject: Summary: Running G94 from cgi

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 09:52:28 +1100 (EETDT)

The other day I posted a problem about Gaussian not running from
a cgi script on a RS6K, while the same script ran perfectly well
on a Dec alpha. I have 'sort-of' solved the problem but a deeper
problem and questions remain.

Thanks to Norbert Paschedag, Joerg Hill, Kris Boulez and Aeint de Boer
for their helpful comments. The general feeling was that this was something
to do with limits and resources. Bang on. Running 'ulimit -a' for
all my users, including the web owner, gives:-

time(seconds)    unlimited
file(blocks)     2097151
data(kbytes)     131072
stack(kbytes)    32768
memory(kbytes)   32768
coredump(blocks) 2048

However if I run 'ulimit -a' from a cgi script I get:-

time(seconds)    unlimited
file(blocks)     2097151
data(kbytes)     unlimited
stack(kbytes)    16384
memory(kbytes)   unlimited
coredump(blocks) unlimited

These were for both hard and soft values. I tried increasing these
in the script before running Gaussian but did not get very far. Then
by accident I killed the httpd and restarted it by hand. Normally
I just start it on boot from inittab.

Now 'ulimit -a' gave the default values and G94 worked!  It seems
that limits are important (and I recall having to change them for
NQS before Gaussian ran). Presumably inetd runs with limited
resources and the default resources are set later. I tried moving
the position of the call to rc.http (to start httpd) in inittab,
including putting it as the very last item. It makes no difference.

So, I can get it working by always starting httpd manually as root,
but some questions remain. Any thoughts? Thanks again to those who
helped.

Cheers, Brian.
-- 
        Associate Professor Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke)
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Northern Territory University,
  Darwin, NT 0909, Australia.  Phone 08-89466702. Fax 08-89410460
e-mail: [email-masked]  WWW http://lacebark.ntu.edu.au/chemistry