Too many MailScanners Spawned

[Matthew Davis]

* Julian Field (mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK) wrote:
> > server, having 5 MailScanners running means I could have 5 spamd's running.
>
> Rubbish :-) MailScanner doesn't use spamd at all, never has done and never
> will do.

But procmail pipes them thru spamc, so I figured after mailscanner was done scanning the emails it sends it to procmail.  And since spamassassin takes longer to scan it gets overloaded (at least on my machine it falls in the overloaded catagory).

> 1 of which is the small parent process, whose sole job is to fork off child
> processes. While the children are running, it does absolutely nothing, it
> just sits there quietly waiting. So it uses no CPU, and any memory it uses
> in your system will very quickly get swapped out to disk in favour of the
> children that are doing the work.

That was basically my only question.  The fact I was seeing 2 mailscanner processes is ok, considering one is the master process and the other is a child.

> Considering the price of memory at the moment, I would second that and
> strongly advise you chuck a bit more RAM at it. You may find your server is
> doing a lot of swapping, but you should be able to work out exactly what is
> causing the poor performance using all the usual system admin and analysis
> tools at your disposal. I'm not going to try to teach you how to use them :-)

Thanks for the advice, I've been sitting on it a while, and ressurected the box with Linux.  Anyway thanks for the help!

Matthew Davis
http://dogpound.vnet.net/
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Saturday, October 26, 2002 / 09:52AM