temporary file spawning

[Denis Beauchemin]

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Ade Fewings wrote:

> Julian Field wrote:
>
>> Ade Fewings wrote:
>>
>>> Following up with more details on my own email.........
>>>
>>>> We have two mail servers running on Solaris 9 Sparc.  Sendmail 8.12.10
>>>> utilizing MailScanner 4.36.4 to call SpamAssassin 3.0.1.  Earlier
>>>> today, one of our large mailing lists got hit a couple of times and
>>>> the servers got a bit busy.  However, something went wrong and /tmp
>>>> filled up with
>>>> spamassassin.25755.Bdgxlb.tmp esque files.  Hundred of thousands were
>>>> created in a short time, running /tmp out of i-nodes and thus
>>>> effectively stopping MailScanner.
>>>>
>>>> Killing MailScanner, cleaning /tmp and restarting would then reproduce
>>>> the problem again soon after.  I truss'd the output of a few of the
>>>> MailScanner processes that were going bad and all they were doing was
>>>> trying to open new files in /tmp.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We have further discovered that this problem definitely only occurs 
>>> when
>>> MailScanner is set to use SpamAssassin.  Switch off SpamAssassin and
>>> there are zero problems.  So, being relatively unknowledgable about
>>> MailScanner, the question that comes up is what is creating these
>>> temporary files?  It is either SpamAssassin itself or something in
>>> MailScanner that gets switched on when you tell it to use SpamAssassin.
>>>
>>> Can anybody offer any guidance on whether MailScanner itself creates
>>> these files?
>>
>>
>>
>> Advise you try increasing
>> SpamAssassin Timeout
>> in MailScanner.conf.
>>
> Thanks for this guidance, but it hasn't worked.  I quadrupled the
> SpamAssassin timeout and got the same behaviour.  Additionally, I have
> had the chance to see a bad MailScanner process in action when things
> are going wrong.  The whole process of creating a couple of hundred
> thousand takes less than twenty seconds and truss'ing the process itself
> shows endless pages of the following sprawling past very quickly:
>
> open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.zEQAlU.tmp",
> O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
> close(256)                                      = 0
> open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.6s0hxi.tmp",
> O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
> close(256)                                      = 0
> open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.4c61CQ.tmp",
> O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
> close(256)                                      = 0
> open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.uPHYoK.tmp",
> O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
> close(256)                                      = 0
> .....
>

Ade,

Anything wrong with /tmp permissions?  Mine (on Linux) looks like:
ls -ld /tmp
drwxrwxrwt   14 root     root        16384 jan 14 13:58 /tmp/

Denis

-- 
   _
  °v°   Denis Beauchemin, analyste
 /(_)\  Université de Sherbrooke, S.T.I.
  ^ ^   T: 819.821.8000x2252 F: 819.821.8045



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