----- Original Message ----- From: "Jack Gostl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "SpamAssassin listserve" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 5:38 AM Subject: [SAtalk] Max children
> > I've seen this two or three times now, and I'm not sure what to make of > it. > > Outward appearance is that we get hit with a ton of spam, or perhaps that > an RBL goes out. I wind up with many copies of spamd running, many more > than the -m parameter should allow. (And forget about procmail and > sendmail. Hundreds of copies.) They never seem to go away, or at best, go > away very, very slowly. > > The monitors show that disk activity is through the roof. > > They all but cripple the machine. Then I go in and kill sendmail, kill all > the procmails and spamds, and restart things, and everything clear up very > quickly. So quickly that it makes me suspicious as to what was REALLY > wrong. Maybe something more than just load, or RBL problems. Maybe a > locking problem. > > I've gone out to CPAN and made sure that all my modules are current, and > that alone may fix it, but after that, what should I look for to help > troubleshoot this one. > I've seen behavior similar to this in 2.5x and only twice since i moved to 2.60-cvs I actually started using proccess accounting for the spamd account beacuse of a lack of workaround. I normally set --max-children to 10 (On a pretty beefy machine that's load average is usually ~0.2). One of my users runs fetchmail about once a day, manually. About one time in twenty (speaking purely anecdotally) spamd does not honor it's max-children settings, and has to get throttled by the kernel. I've traced each email as it's come through, and even been watching my logs while it happened, but I have never been able to reproduce it. I figured it's probably something wacky in my local setup or config. I find that a simple "killall -9 spamd" allowed me to grab control of my machine without having to restart the entire mail subsystem. (I run spamd and spamc on seperate machines) Besides, the worst you'll get with a dead spamd is a spam in your inbox. woooooo... what was life before SA? Anything mounted over NFS? Race condition? Lay down some policy-law and throttle the processes/users in-kernel? Now that I know i'm not the only one, i'll actually be motivated to figure it out... ;-) -r ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: INetU Attention Web Developers & Consultants: Become An INetU Hosting Partner. Refer Dedicated Servers. We Manage Them. You Get 10% Monthly Commission! INetU Dedicated Managed Hosting http://www.inetu.net/partner/index.php _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
