Number of SendMail Processes

[Matt Kettler]

At 06:36 PM 6/18/2003 -0500, Steve Douglas wrote:
>When the command service MailScanner start is issued I receive the correct
>number of processes for the MailScanner children.  However when I issue the
>command ps -A |more I show there are three sendmail processes running.  Does
>this sound correct?

Provided the extra processes are delivery processes, yes... sendmail forks
off extra processes while transferring mail.

For example I get (some details changed for privacy and security reasons,
including PIDs, SMTP IDs, and domain names)

  1 ?        S      0:04 sendmail: accepting connections
2 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -q15m
3 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: server blah.example.com
4 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: server mail03.example.com
  5 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: server [1.1.1.1] cmd read
6 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: ./h5FZFDs12724 example.com.: user ope
7 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: ./h5K16Rq30494 stdin-01.example.com.:
8 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: ./h5AYeBv01611 euclid.example.com.
9 ?        S      0:00 sendmail: ./h5ZQoKf01417 mail.example.com.

Only #1 and #2 were started by the startup scripts.. 3 - 9 were spawned to
handle mail transfers.