OT: mailscanner & oom killer on fc2

[Peter Russell]

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We just ahd the exact same problem on RHEL4 we have 3 machines but this
ocured on only one of them.

Vlad Mazek wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> Troubleshooting MailScanner on friends machine and I seem to be running
> into a problem that may be related to MailScanner  but I can't quite
> figure out what is the issue (hardware or software) and my Googling so
> far has been futile, thus the OT message. System is stock Fedora FC2
> with 2.6.10. As you read this message please keep in mind that I'm not
> drunk, this is what I'm seeing:
>
> At start MailScanner process simply hits the roof:
> ----
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+
> COMMAND
> 29947 root      25   0  137m 131m 3188 R 92.4  8.6   0:15.15
> MailScanner
> 27854 root      25   0  766m 760m 2828 R 92.1 50.1   6:46.87
> MailScanner
> ----
> Running it in debug mode does not reveal anything unusual.
>
> As the system starts to run out of memory, MailScanner keeps on spawning
> - Its set to 5 children, I've seen it go as high up as 40. It keeps on
> growing until it allocates all available ram:
> ----
> Tasks:  90 total,   4 running,  86 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 94.5% us,  5.5% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 0.0% si
> Mem:   1554180k total,  1485752k used,    68428k free,     4084k buffers
> Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    31016k cached
> ----
>
> This is where oom killer steps in. MailScanner eventually runs out of
> memory and gets killed. Another MailScanner thread starts in its place,
> until they eat up all available memory. Thats when oom killer steps in
> and things get ugly very fast:
>
> ----
> Mar 30 07:44:21 mail1 root: Process did not exit cleanly, returned 255
> with signal 0
> Mar 30 07:46:14 mail1 kernel: oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x1d2
> Mar 30 07:46:17 mail1 kernel: Mem-info:
> Mar 30 07:46:23 mail1 kernel: DMA per-cpu:
> Mar 30 07:48:06 mail1 kernel: cpu 0 hot: low 2, high 6, batch 1
> Mar 30 07:48:42 mail1 shutdown: shutting down for system reboot
> Mar 30 07:48:42 mail1 kernel: cpu 0 cold: low 0, high 2, batch 1
> Mar 30 07:48:45 mail1 sshd(pam_unix)[30028]: session opened for user

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