zombie processes

[Paul Mc Auley]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 05:05:23PM +1000, James Gray wrote:
| Julian Field wrote:
| > At 18:42 15/06/2004, Marcel Karras wrote:
| >> 2. Whenever I send a mail, there'll be a new zombie process and ps shows
| >> "[MailScanner <defunct>]". The mail will be scanned and delivered just
| >> perfect but you can certainly imagine what would happen if this server
| >> would work in a productive area rather than a testing one.

| > And you should find it will destroy the zombie process itself pretty
| > quickly too.

| I've noticed this zombie process too on my Linux+exim gateways.  FreeBSD
| seems unaffected but all the BSD gateways run sendmail.

| I know what zombies are and why they occur, but "mailscanner <defunct>"
| is never being cleaned up.  So I did some digging that might help solve
| why.  The following applies to all my Debian (woody) systems running
| exim3, MailScanner 4.31.6 and McAfee.

Same for me running Debian + exim4 + SA 2.63

It seems that the troublesome processes become orphaned (ppid = 1).
This can lead to up to a hundred instances sitting there eating memory.

Ultimately I resorted to running check_mailscanner in debug mode from
cron, which isn't pretty but seems to work a lot better.
        Paul

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