MailScanner processes die and don't restart

[Vasantha Narayanan]

Hi,

We've 15 MailScanner processes running on our system.  When a MailScanner
process dies of old age, another one seems to restart almost
immediately.  But occasionally new ones don't seem to start after old one
dies.  And, even though I've "check_mailscanner" running in cron every 20
minutes, it has no effect, i.e, it does not start new processes because I
think the "check_mailscanner" script is not designed to start MailScanner
processes as long as some MailScanner processes are running.  As a result
what happens is, when such a situation arises, we've only about 3
MailScanner processes running and that is not enough to process all our
mail.  Hence a lot of mail gets held up in the incoming queue.  To solve
the problem, I've had to manually kill the remaining few MailScanner
processes and then restart it using "check_mailscanner".    But by then so
much mail is in the queue that it takes a long time for the mail to get
cleared resume normal mail processes.

Is there a script that will keep track of how many processes are supposed
to be running and if it is short of that, it will start that many
more?   Is there some other solution to this problem?

Thanks.

Vasantha