file descriptors on FreeBSD

[Remco Barendse]

Have you checked how much memory is in use? I always used to run my
mailserver on a redhat box with 128 Mb which worked fine. When I upgraded
to RedHat 8 and started to use SpamAssassin 128 wasn't anywhere near
enough even if it would only serve e-mails for my home!

If I would get 2-3 e-mails at the same time the system would go into a
grinding halt for about 30-45 second because it was swapping like crazy.

After upgrading to 320 Mb mem it got a lot better. A friend of mine had
similar problems but he couldn't sort them out. Sending 20 test mails at
the same time to his server would jump the load average to about 11!!!
SpamAssassin really is a resource hungry beast

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Craig Bates wrote:

> Hi Julian
>
> As a temporary fix, I'm going to have a cron job stop and start mailScanner
> every hour.  I'll let you know if this works.   I read somewhere that
> MailScanner shouldn't loose any mail, so this should be ok.
>
> Is there any information I can give you that would help?
>
> I'm running Sendmail sendmail-8.12.6, compiled from source with ldap support
> (I didn't use a port).  I've got razor-agents-2.22, razor-agents-sdk-2.03,
> SpamAssassin-2.43 installed.
>
> Thanks
>
> Craig
>
>
> On Tuesday 10 December 2002 11:16, you wrote:
> > At 21:57 09/12/2002, you wrote:
> > >I've come to the conclusion that this is definitely a mailscanner
> > >problem.  If
> > >I kill off all Mailscanner processes and restart it, then the problem
> > > seems to go away for a while.  MailScanner is set to restart every 4
> > > hours, but this doesn't seem to help.  Does the parent Mailscanner
> > > process ever restart or only the children?
> >
> > The parent process doesn't restart, but it does virtually nothing once it
> > has started up the children.
> > I'm going to have to install a FreeBSD system and investigate this one,
> > assuming I can recreate it.
> >
> > >Craig
> > >
> > >On Monday 09 December 2002 10:47, you wrote:
> > > > >So I'm assuming that the file descriptors problem is related to
> > > > > MailScanner dying every now and then.  I have recently installed two
> > > > > new FreeBSD4.7 servers and installed MailScanner on both and both
> > > > > have this problem, so it is not hardware.
> > > > >
> > > > >Sendmail does not give this error on every message, only a few per
> > > > > day. Are there any FreeBSD experts out there?
> > > > >
> > > > >Thanks,
> > > > >
> > > > >Craig
> > > >
> > > > Craig,
> > > >
> > > > Put the following in /etc/sysctl.conf:
> > > >
> > > > kern.maxfiles=65536             # System-wide limit
> > > > kern.maxfilesperproc=32768      # Per-process limit
> > > >
> > > > and add the following to your mailscanner/mta startup scripts:
> > > >
> > > > ulimit -n 32768
> > > >
> > > > That should take care of any file descriptor issues on FreeBSD.
>


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