temporary file spawning

[Julian Field]

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Ade Fewings wrote:

> 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.

These files are generated by SpamAssassin and not MailScanner itself. So
that is where you need to look. Check you are running a recent
File::Temp module and that your Perl is new enough (I don't think
SpamAssassin supports anything older than about 5.6.1).

You can easily install a new perl from www.sunfreeware.com and then just
mv /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl.SUN
ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl
This will ensure that the new Perl is always used regardless of the $PATH.

My own production MailScanner servers are mostly Solaris boxes and I
have never seen this problem on there, so it's not a general problem.
Let me know if the new perl helps.

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
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