SpamAssassin version 3.0.1
  running on Perl version 5.8.5
SunOS email 5.6 Generic_105181-31 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4

I was investigating a runaway spamd child process (it was using a lot of CPU,
wasn't processing messages, and didn't go away on its own).  I found the 
following
messages in the log file:

Nov 11 14:53:51 email.cind.ornl.gov spamd[2729]: server successfully spawned 
child process, pid 12083
Nov 11 14:53:57 email.cind.ornl.gov spamd[12083]: connection from 
emroute2.cind.ornl.gov [160.91.86.17] at port 63320
Nov 11 14:53:57 email.cind.ornl.gov spamd[12083]: processing message <[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]> for pmdf:0.
Nov 11 14:54:01 email.cind.ornl.gov spamd[12083]: razor2 check skipped: Too 
many open files IO::Socket::INET: Bad protocol 'udp'_...propagated at 
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Dns.pm line 454, <GEN3> 
line 224.

After that the process sucks up CPU and doesn't make further entries in the log 
file.

I have modified the startup file by adding

ulimit -n 256

to increase the limit for open file descriptors (the default appears to be 64),
but I have a few questions:

1) Am I correct that the cause of the problem was the open file limit?

2) What is a good value to use?  (Is 256 a good value?)

3) Do the developers need to look at the code and find a more graceful way
for it to fail when the open file limit is too low?


Thanks, Larry

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