Mailscanner suddenly started taking up 100% of available memory

[Andrew Hoying]

Well, when reverting to an older dat file didn't fix the problem, I broke
down and rebooted the system. When it came back up everything worked fine.
I'm not sure what caused the problem in the first place, but will keep my
eye on the system for any further troubles. It's running redhat 7.1 with
kernel version 2.4.14 patched with the grsec patch version 1.8.9.

Andrew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK]On
> Behalf Of Andrew Hoying
> Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 11:20 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Mailscanner suddenly started taking up 100% of available
> memory
>
>
> Some more information.
>
> Here is the process after only 9 minutes:
>
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> root      7644 21.0 68.1 107408 85776 ?      S    11:07   1:51
> /usr/bin/perl
> /usr/local/MailScanner/bin/mailscanner
> Fri Apr 19 11:16:14 MDT 2002
>
> And here is the changed files in the last 3 days:
>
> [/usr]# find ./ -mtime -3
> ./local/uvscan
> ./local/uvscan/scan.dat
> ./local/uvscan/names.dat
> ./local/uvscan/clean.dat
> ./local/uvscan/readme.txt
> ./local/uvscan/file_id.diz
> ./local/uvscan/mcscript.ini
> ./local/uvscan/packing.lst
> ./local/uvscan/pkgdesc.ini
> ./local/uvscan/validate.exe
> ./local/uvscan/delta.ini
> ./local/uvscan/dat-4197.tar
> ./local/uvscan/reseller.txt
> ./local/MailScanner/etc
> ./local/MailScanner/var/virus.pid
>
> It's to the point where I've been restarting mailscanner every 15
> minutes to
> keep the system running smoothly.
>
> Any help at all is greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Andrew
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK]On
> > Behalf Of Andrew Hoying
> > Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 9:30 AM
> > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: Mailscanner suddenly started taking up 100% of available memory
> >
> >
> > Yesterday morning, for the first time, mailscanner began
> consuming several
> > hundred megabytes of memory every hour until the system ran out
> of memory
> > and killed mailscanner. The process would then repeat every 4
> hours or so.
> > Regardless of the fact that I should have resource limits in place to
> > prevent mailscanner from using all the memory, I've never seen
> > this behavior
> > before. I've been running mailscanner on this server since
> October of last
> > year without any similar problems. I am currently running
> version  3.13-2.
> > The only thing that changed, and I'm pretty sure that this is
> the culprit,
> > is that mcafee auto-updated to dat version 4197 on Wednesday.
> I'm not sure
> > where to begin troubleshooting this particular problem, and certainly am
> > open to suggestions.
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Andrew
> >
>