On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 01:06:23PM -0500, Mark E. Drummond wrote:
> I was working from home last Friday when my boss sent me an email
> telling me that the MX had run out of swap (256MB physical swap) and needed to
> be rebooted. So I have gone searching my logs for telltale information but I
> have found next to nothing. I noticed that "status" messages in my smtpd log
> were up around 17/40 around the time of the reboot, but that is nothing
> phenominal I don't think. It has been stable ever since (and was stable for the
> 87 days before that, but I only added Scan4Virus and RSS checking in the past
> week or two).
When qmail-smtpd runs, it allocates as much memory as required to
store the SMTP commands. If you connect to qmail-smtpd, and send
lots and lots of RCPTs for example, it will go on allocating memory
until the memory usage on your machine goes really high.
The solution to this problem is to limit the memory usage of
qmail-smtpd, by using the shell's ulimit feature. If you limit each
qmail-smtpd to say, 2 MB, and you allow up 40 connections, then at
worst, the lot of them would use up 80 MB of RAM. Since you have
256 MB RAM, you would probably be fine with this setting. If you
don't limit the memory use, even a single qmail-smtpd can use up
lots of memory and cause the machine to swap.
I don't know if this is your problem, but its worth investigating.
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