Children and Mailscanner halting & atachments

[Julian Field]

At 15:28 24/03/2004, you wrote:
>Hi
>I have 3 problems that may or may not be connected but all
>occurred since upgrading to 4.29.2-1 last week.
>1) I have number of children set to 1.I would therefore expected a
>maximum of 2 Mailscanner processes (1 parent 1 child) and 4
>sendmail processes (one for each in and out queue for each
>process).
>Have I got this wrong? I thought not after reading some of the FAQs
>on it.
>After 'MailScanner start' I see more than  2 MailScanners and
>currently there are 3 with 11 sendmails running. None are shown
>as defunct so it doesn't look like one is about to clear whilst
>another is starting.

Many things within MailScanner temporarily spawn off extra processes to
handle things such as timeouts. You should find "the 3rd one" changed its
process id very frequently, as it is actually a string of short-living
processes and not one that runs for hours.

You may get many sendmail processes running as it tries deliveries. There
is a sendmail.cf setting "MaxDaemonChildren" which you may want to reduce
to limit the amount of resources used by sendmail itself.

>2) I had reduced the number of Children from 5 as I was having
>problems MailScanner this morning. It showed 9 MailScanners and
>I think it was 15 sendmails running. Mail was getting to the
>mqueue.in directory but not being processed. It appeared to stop
>processing at 05:10 (this has happened before but a restart sorted
>it out). I stopped Mailscanner and then restarted the server.This
>time the CPU processing went to 100% and stayed there.
>I stopped MailScanner and altered the number of children to reduce
>memory usage. After a struggle the backlog of emails (3000)
>cleared and usage is now sensible at 60-80% idle.

If any of sendmail or nscd or named is taking a large amount of memory,
this can happen. On machines without much RAM I always crank down
MaxDaemonChildren to 5 or 6, otherwise it will try to start up 30 quite
easily, which totally hogs the machine.

>3) If I send multiple attachments I get {blocked content} if I send
>them separately they go through.
>I have maximum number of attachments set to 200 but am only
>attaching 10!

What does the attachment report actually say? "{blocked content}" can be
created by a whole load of things, you need to be more specific.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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