"too many open files"

[Julian Field]

At 17:02 25/11/2002, you wrote:
>We had rather more spam than usual over the weekend and mailscanner
>had problems keeping up. What stopped it eventually was  "Too many
>open files" from MailScanner. This seemed to be down to a large
>no of messages in /var/spool/mqueue.in.
>
>I added "/usr/bin/ulimit -Sn 4096" to the start script but that
>was not altogether successful. - I had to feed a few hundred mail
>messages to mailscanner at a time, until it got the backlog down.
>
>Has anyone else had to do this ?

In your MailScanner.conf (or mailscanner.conf), set

Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 100
Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 100

You will find one of these values is probably set at 500 at the moment. It
shouldn't cause any noticeable performance hit but will drastically reduce
the number of file handles needed.

For more info on this, see my "MailScanner dying occasionally?" posting
from Sunday afternoon.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ