"too many open files"

[Julian Field]

At 17:23 25/11/2002, you wrote:
>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.

ulimit is a command built into the shell (and has to be). It exists in bash.
I have added "ulimit -n 2000" to the Linux RPM version of the
check_MailScanner script, and changed it from being a /bin/sh script to a
/bin/bash script. Its effect appears to propagate into the code perfectly well.

>>  - 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