file descriptors on FreeBSD

[Craig Bates]

I have the same problem on two servers.  One has 1GB of Ram and the other 
128MB of RAM.  I've pumped 4000 emails through the 128MB box at a one second 
interval without problems.   ....but a few hours later it developed problems.   
The 1GB RAM box is still being build and has only local email and it has 
problems too.   So it seems that is it the length of time mailscanner has 
being running, not how much it is doing.   (at least that is how it appears)

On Tuesday 10 December 2002 11:47, you wrote:
> 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.