MailScanner stops working after dying of old child

[Muenz, Michael]

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Hi,

on 25.4.2005 I wrote a message to the list with the topic above.
MailScanner stops working after instance dying of old age.
I didn't see the error for 2 months now and it comes again.
Now with more infos:

Last messages in syslog:
Jun  4 02:30:35 pns MailScanner[20452]: Uninfected: Delivered 1 messages
Jun  4 02:30:35 pns MailScanner[20452]: MailScanner child dying of old age
Jun  4 02:30:35 pns MailScanner[5471]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
version 4.42.9 starting...
Jun  4 02:30:36 pns MailScanner[5471]: Using locktype = flock

"ps aufx" showed me that all processes are "running", but nothing was
scanned.
New mails always get deferred, nothing more.

After killing and restarting MailScanner this in log:
Jun  4 12:15:15 pns MailScanner[18097]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
version 4.42.9 starting...
Jun  4 12:15:16 pns MailScanner[18097]: Using locktype = flock
Jun  4 12:15:17 pns MailScanner[18097]: New Batch: Found 3085 messages
waiting
Jun  4 12:15:17 pns MailScanner[18097]: New Batch: Scanning 80 messages,
319186 bytes

Mail gets processed but MailScanner starts to many childs (set to 5):
18097 postfix   18   0 40160  39M 25716 R    10.3  4.4   0:39 MailScanner
17282 postfix   18   0 40048  39M 33056 R    11.5  4.4   0:37 MailScanner
 7445 postfix   18   0 40000  39M 25092 R    12.3  4.4   0:31 MailScanner
15755 postfix   19   0 39748  38M 32956 R     0.3  4.3   0:00 MailScanner
25836 postfix   20   0 39664  38M  9836 R     6.7  4.3   0:32 MailScanner
28647 postfix   20   0 39588  38M 25616 R     1.1  4.3   0:00 MailScanner
29400 postfix   18   0 39576  38M 25768 R    12.1  4.3   0:33 MailScanner
29126 postfix   20   0 39428  38M 24988 R     1.3  4.3   0:00 MailScanner
12280 postfix   20   0 39004  38M 25668 R     1.1  4.3   0:00 MailScanner
 3961 root       9   0 30856  28M  3156 S     0.0  3.1  57:40 perl
24285 named      9   0 23184  19M  4772 S     0.1  2.2  87:20 named
27324 postfix    9   0 15012  14M  8972 S     0.0  1.6   0:00 MailScanner

I downgraded to another version, always the same. But it dies not every time
a child is dying. I've now a cronjob restarting MailScanner every 4 hours.
No errors until now.
Another problem is that check_mailscanner script only checks if the process
is running, so it doesn't detect the error wenn MailScanner stops because
all processes are running.

I searched all my logs, especially for HDA errors or something like that,
but nothing found.

My system is debian woody with postfix 2.0.20 (source), all perl modules
newest version (source) and MailScanner also 4.42.9. The system is running
with RAID1 (hardware).

I think that's a problem with I/O but not sure a problem
with RAID or MailScanner.

Any ideas?


Michael

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