temporary file spawning

[Ade Fewings]

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Denis Beauchemin wrote:

> 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
>
Denis,

There doesn't appear to be:

drwxrwxrwt   3 root     sys          256 Jan 14 19:08 tmp

The group being sys is normal for Solaris and all our machines have
always used that.

The problem only seems to occur when one of the mail servers comes under
a bit of a load, such as a mailing list type thing.  I watched the
incoming queues go up to 600 on each server earlier and things were
fine.  In both servers, MailScanner was going fine until the incoming
mail queue got down to between 250-300 and then it behaved as above and
I had to restart and (unfortunately) pass some mail without running
SpamAssassin over it as the problem kept occurring if I cleaned /tmp and
restarted MailScanner.

I'm thinking of trying a new Perl build now......really have no other
ideas left.

Thanks
Ade

--
___________________________________________________
Ade Fewings MEng

School of Informatics, University of Wales, Bangor,
Dean Street, Bangor, Gwynedd. LL57 1UT. UK.

ade at informatics.bangor.ac.uk  www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/~ade
Tel: +44 (0)1248 382736       Fax: +44 (0)1248 361429
___________________________________________________


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