Hi Mark,
Firstly thanks for your very prompt reply.
> Three symptoms of the same problem: fork fails, apparently because
> system is low on memory. To find a cause you'll need to find
> what is consuming memory - use system tools (ps, vmstat, ...).
> Btw, how many amavisd child processes are you running?
I could see that the machines were running out of memory, though I wasn't
sure what was causing it. I've been monitoring them for the past couple of
hours, having rebooted everything previously. It seems that there are
problems when SA is called, with amavis eating memory and CPU. Looking
through the logs I think I've narrowed it down to the PDFInfo.pm plugin for
SA, this seems to be not far away when errors are thrown:
Sep 6 01:28:54 server2 amavis[22301]: (22301-07-29) (!)SA TIMED OUT,
backtrace: at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
203\n\teval {...} called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
203\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::__ANON__('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbde6f98)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::Message::Node=HASH(0xbe0a48c)') called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
417\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::_find_pdf_mime_parts('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbde6f98)') called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
681\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::pdf_match_fuzzy_md5('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbde6f98)', 'ARRAY(0xbddeb80)',
'653C8AA9FDFD03D38252[...]
Sep 6 01:30:39 server2 amavis[23888]: (23888-02-2) (!!)TROUBLE in
check_mail: parts_decode_ext FAILED: run_command (open pipe): Can't fork at
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/File.pm line 70, <GEN18> line 207. at
/usr/local/sbin/amavisd line 2598, <GEN18> line 207.
Sep 6 01:30:40 server2 amavis[23888]: (23888-02-2) (!)PRESERVING EVIDENCE
in /var/lib/amavis/amavis-20070906T013021-23888
Sep 6 01:33:55 server2 amavis[23889]: (23889-02-8) (!)SA TIMED OUT,
backtrace: at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
203\n\teval {...} called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
203\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::__ANON__('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbeeaa90)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::Message::Node=HASH(0xbe0ced0)') called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
417\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::_find_pdf_mime_parts('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbeeaa90)') called at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/PDFInfo.pm line
681\n\tMail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo::pdf_match_fuzzy_md5('Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::PDFInfo=HASH(0xa466b10)',
'Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus=HASH(0xbeeaa90)', 'ARRAY(0xbd7cb90)',
'653C8AA9FDFD03D38252[...]
I've disabled this module in SA and restarted amavis and everything seems to
have been ok for the past hour or so, the load is normal (0.1 - 0.2), with
300mb of memory free. There's obviously something in this module at fault
somewhere. I'm running PDFInfo.pm version 0.7 though it doesn't appear from
the changelog that anything has been fixed in the latest release (0.8),
other than adding FDF support.
Has anybody else had problems with this Plugin?
In response to your question, I've got the following in amavisd.conf:
$max_servers = 4;
$max_requests = 10;
$child_timeout = 8*60;
Thanks again
Richard
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