Children and Mailscanner halting & atachments

[Spicer, Kevin]

Howard Robinson 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. 

Sendmail forks a process for each incoming connection, and to deliver mail.  You can if necessary limit the number of incoming connections allowed in sendmail.mc.  On an idle system you would see three sendmail processes, the listener, the queue runner and the submission handler.

MailScanner children do fork during execution in order to apply timeouts when calling external programs.  Its therefore quite normal to see 1 + (children * 2) mailscanner processes - note that the grandchild may only exist briefly, so your number of mailscanner processes should alternate between 2 and 3.



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