"Restart Every" option in MailScanner.conf?

[Julian Field]

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shuttlebox wrote:

> On 12/30/05, *Michael Mansour* <micoots at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:micoots at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     Is it correct to say that this setting is only
>     relevant when MailScanner is actually started?
>     (otherwise how could the conf file be read).
>
>     However, for some reason, MailScanner runs on the
>     standby node, even though I don't have it starting up
>     on boot, and I don't have mailscanner-mrtg starting it
>     up either (there's a setting in mailscanner-mrtg which
>     monitors MailScanner processes). I'm not sure why
>     MailScanner starts on the standby node when it
>     shouldn't.
>
>
> The parent MailScanner process never stops running, it doesn't perform 
> any actual mail work but kills off old children and spawns new ones at 
> those intervals specified in "Restart every..." and when you issue a 
> MailScanner reload. The children read the config themselves when they 
> start.

Apart from re-reading the config files, this is for protection against 
memory leaks and other resources. It is highly likely that Perl leaks 
some memory when running an application the size of MailScanner. So to 
protect against that, the processes periodically die off and are 
re-started, freeing up all the leaked resources.

>
> Look for cron jobs that might start MailScanner, both crontab for the 
> root user and cron.hourly and such directories. On Linux systems they 
> are added when you install MailScanner.

/etc/cron.hourly is where to look. If you stop MailScanner with "service 
MailScanner stop" then it will write a flag that tells the cron job not 
to do anything.

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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