Single process taking over?

[Stephe Campbell]

Mr. Field,

I have been going through pretty much the same situation as described with
this post. The exception is that my machine does not show a domineering
process and load average drops to near nothing. I have been trying to change
sendmail to remedy this problem, but I may be looking at the wrong part of
the puzzle. I have still not determined what is going on, but I do see a lot
of Bayes lock files and one main bayes.lock file. It peaks once I see the
bayes_toks.new file which seems to stay around forever. I offer this only to
maybe point things toward a solution.

I am running
    MS 4.26.8-1
    SA 2.61-1
    ClamAV 0.65
    MailWatch 0.5.1
    Sendmail 8.11.6-27.73
    RH 7.3

I upgraded MS on a Monday and MailWatch on a Wednesday. That week problems
started happening. The problems seemed to be resolved by my removing my
Bayes files (you suggested poisoning, and this appeared to have been the
case), but since I must stop MS, remove all of the bayes lock files, the
bayes_tok.new file, restart MS and all appears fine. Load average climbs to
normal to normal-high limits, my incoming backlog clears quickly and
everything is fine. I replaced my Message.pm file with the the one you
posted to the list, and that is the only other change I have made to the
above installed programs.

I hope some common thread may appear from my configuration and what others
describe to shed some light on this. Most people don't complain about load
averages this low, but to me it signals a slow down in my mail system,
creating backlogs in the incoming queue.

Thank you for your efforts, sir.

Steve Campbell
campbell at cnpapers.com
Charleston Newspapers

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Field" <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 7:24 AM
Subject: Re: Single process taking over?


> At 11:38 17/02/2004, you wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> > > Behalf Of Julian Field
> > > Sent: Tuesday, 17 February 2004 8:36 PM
> > > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > > Subject: Re: Single process taking over?
> > >
> > > Ah, a reproducible fault! I like those :-)
> >
> >I don't!!  :)
> >
> > > What does your MailScanner.conf look like? (just the interesting bits,
> > > don't care what all the filenames of your reports are and stuff like
> > > that).
> >
> >See below..
> >
> > > What virus scanner(s), SpamAssassin, etc?
> >
> >ClamAV, McAfee, Spamassassin 2.6.3, DCC, Razor
> >
> > > What is the last thing the runaway process logs before CPU hogging?
> >
> >Nothing abnormal, just the process starting and mail being processed,
even
> >in verbose logging, it just appears to be a normal process that won't let
> >the other threads have any resources.  If I kill it, the other threads
spawn
> >and run as per normal.
> >
> > > Does the CPU hogging start the instant you start MailScanner, or the
> > > instant the first child process runs, or when?
> >
> >As soon as mail begins to be processed.  If no mail is in the queue, not
> >hogging, but the second any mail is in queue it's hogging.
> >
> >MailScanner.conf
> >============================================
> >Max Children = 4
> >Queue Scan Interval = 1
> >MTA = sendmail
> >Max Unscanned Bytes Per Scan = 100000000
> >Max Unsafe Bytes Per Scan = 50000000
> >Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 15
> >Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 15
> >Virus Scanning = yes
> >Virus Scanners = mcafee clamav
> >Virus Scanner Timeout = 300
> >Spam Checks = yes
> >Spam List =
> >Use SpamAssassin = yes
> >Max SpamAssassin Size = 90000
> >Deliver In Background = yes
> >Delivery Method = batch
>
> Do you reckon you could reproduce the problem on a box to which you could
> give me login access? I suspect it's something very simple, but I have
> never witnessed it here and it's apparently not a common problem.
> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support
>
> PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654