System load very high

[Dan Leavitt]

Thanks for the ideas and sorry for the second posting, as I said my machine was behaving badly, fortunately the mailing list server
rejected a couple of identical copies as well.

I haven't seen any difficulties with the nameserver, which runs
on the localhost and is the only entry in resolv.conf and which has
no forwarders configured.

I have the stock SA configuration with the only SA controls being
those in MailScanner.conf, except that I've set skip_rbl_checks
in spam.assassin.prefs.conf.   The only RBL checks that I'm
doing are done by sendmail and these entries in my .mc file:
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `relays.ordb.org')
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `proxies.relays.monkeys.com')

I haven't monitored memory usage, that could be an issue I suppose.  I know that perl doesn't like to free memory back to the system
once its
allocated, it just keeps it in its own pool.

We use sendmail, not postfix.

Dan



----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Field" <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 4:08 AM
Subject: Re: System load very high


> Are you using Postfix? If so, there was a problem that would cause this (a
> message with absolutely no body at all) which I have since fixed in the
> latest beta.
> It took me 160,000 messages to be able to reproduce the problem :-(
>
> At 02:23 20/05/2003, you wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >Drat.   The system load has once again climbed sky-high - it's currently
> >at 39!   Sendmail is refusing connections and all of my
> >MailScanner processes show in the run-state and near the top 6 with top.
> >
> >I get frequent SpamAssassin timeout messages and until today was also
> >getting InfinteMonkeys and ORD-RBL timeouts as well.  I've
> >removed the RBL settings from MailScanner.conf and implemented same in
> >sendmail.cf and they seem to work fine with no timeouts.
> >
> >Can someone give me some ideas what to look for with this.   I've seen
> >others in the past with similar problems but I haven't been
> >able to find their solutions in the FAQ or anywhere.
> >
> >The system died before this message got sent, but interestingly, when
> >it was rebooted, it handled the 150 or so backed up messages in
> >relatively short order.  It had been up for about 3 months.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Dan
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Peter Peters" <P.G.M.Peters at CIV.UTWENTE.NL>
> >To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> >Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 9:24 AM
> >Subject: Re: Palyh-A virus
> >
> >
> > > On Mon, 19 May 2003 06:41:54 -0600, you wrote:
> > >
> > > >Thanks to MailScanner, three .pif attachments that included Palyh-A were
> > > >stopped before Sophos had an updated definition!
> > >
> > > It is called W32/Sobig.B at mm by f-prot.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Peter Peters, senior netwerkbeheerder
> > > Dienst Informatietechnologie, Bibliotheek en Educatie (ITBE)
> > > Universiteit Twente,  Postbus 217,  7500 AE  Enschede
> > > telefoon: 053 - 489 2301, fax: 053 - 489 2383, http://www.utwente.nl/civ
> > >
>
> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support
>