possible bug in httptunnel (htc)

[Philip Yarra]

Hi all, I have downloaded and had a play with httptunnel-3.0.5. I think I have 
hit a bug in the htc tool. My steps are:

1) start hts on remote machine
2) start htc on local machine, pointing to proxy server
3) start ssh application to use the htc tunnel
4) successful ssh login to remote machine
5) logout of remote machine
6) check that htc is still running (it is)
7) start ssh application to re-use the htc tunnel. It's here that things start 
going screwy: my local machine suddnly has 100% CPU utilisation, 100% RAM 
usage (1 GB physical RAM), and swap starts to get chewed up. I know it's 
rather unscientific, but I've attached a screengrab of the resource use - 
it's rather graphic. You can clearly see the sudden spikes in RAM and swap 
usage.

I'm having trouble proving it is htc causing this behaviour, since at this 
point the machine is pretty well dead in the water, and my running top 
process gets edged off the CPU. I am fairly sure it is htc, as if I manually 
kill and re-start htc between steps 6 and 7, this problem does not occur.

When time allows I'll try to search for the cause. My suspicion is that 
there's some runaway loop, possibly that's malloc'ing something (having seen 
this sort of issue in my own code before). Does this sound possible?

Frustratingly, when I compile with debug enabled, this problem does not occur, 
so I'm having a tough time locating the problem. It doesn't seem to matter if 
I run with debugging on, so long as it was compiled with debug... I'm going 
to have a snoop around the #ifdef DEBUG_MODE blocks for possible issues.

In case you're interested, the remote machine is Mandrake 9.2 (kernel 2.4.22, 
gcc version 3.3.1) and the local machine is RedHat WS 3 (kernel 
2.4.21-32.ELsmp, gcc version 3.2.3).

Please let me know if I can assist with solving this issue. If I find it first 
I'll submit a patch.

Regards, Philip.

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