file descriptors on FreeBSD

[Julian Field]

At 23:09 09/12/2002, you wrote:
>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)

You can drastically reduce the memory requirements by reducing "Max
Children" to 2 for example.


>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.

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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