UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Has the box been up for long? There may be a kernel malfunction here...

Try "truss sleep 15" and watch the results. You get a lot of output here but the important stuff is:
alarm(15) = 0
(There will be a lot of space between the (15) and the =)
Then a sigsuspend...
Then after about 15 seconds I get...
"Received signal #14 SIGALRM, in sigsuspend [caught]"

Then a sigsuspend....Err#4 EINTR....we expect that, we wanted our system call to be interrupted.

Then a setcontext.

And then a "alarm(0) = 0". And this is important. An alarm(2) call returns the amount of time remaining in the alarm clock of the process. If this is not zero, then the SIGALARM may have been sent by another process and someone may be playing a game.

But if the alarm went to zero without 15 seconds elapsing then the kernel must be broken. In this case I would try a reboot.

Everything happened as you mentioned EXCEPT there was no 15 second delay after :

===============================
alarm(15) = 0
(There will be a lot of space between the (15) and the =)
Then a sigsuspend...
===============================

Also I tried different times and matched with my watch:

sleep 1500 = 35 seconds approx.
sleep 600 = 14 seconds approx.

Well, the alarm function in the kernel seems to be broken. I really do recommend a reboot here.

What a weird problem.