Mailscanner suddenly started taking up 100% of available memory

[Andrew Hoying]

I guess I spoke to soon, while rebooting it fixed the problem for about a
half hour, it started consuming memory again and after 20 minutes since I
last restarted the mailscanner process it is using 170MB of memory, with
94MB of locked memory. I really need some help troubleshooting this one, so
any suggestions would be 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 12:01 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Mailscanner suddenly started taking up 100% of available
> memory
>
>
> 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
> > >
> >
>