loop and load problems..

[Gordon Colyn]

ITNT Banner CampaignI have a problem on my mailscanner where my avg load 
goes suddenly from 0.5 to 1.5 and remains there for days including weekends 
when there is very little traffic.  After some investigation I found the 
following;

[root at sentinal3 ~]# tail -f /var/log/mail/info | grep messages
Sep 14 21:50:15 sentinal3 MailScanner[5803]: Spam Checks: Found 23 spam 
messages
Sep 14 21:50:24 sentinal3 MailScanner[6015]: New Batch: Scanning 30 
messages, 288635 bytes
Sep 14 21:50:52 sentinal3 MailScanner[6015]: Spam Checks: Found 23 spam 
messages
Sep 14 21:51:03 sentinal3 MailScanner[7661]: New Batch: Scanning 30 
messages, 288635 bytes
Sep 14 21:51:23 sentinal3 MailScanner[7661]: Spam Checks: Found 23 spam 
messages
Sep 14 21:51:32 sentinal3 MailScanner[7733]: New Batch: Scanning 30 
messages, 288635 bytes
Sep 14 21:51:56 sentinal3 MailScanner[7733]: Spam Checks: Found 23 spam 
messages
Sep 14 21:52:03 sentinal3 MailScanner[7567]: New Batch: Scanning 30 
messages, 288635 bytes

I stopped delivery by blocking port 25 with my firewall and found that 
mailscanner was not doing anything with the above messages, going into a 
loop and causing one of the child processes to sit at 45-60% of cpu usage.

When I check the mail queue there are messages that are 2 days old sitting 
in the queue with a status sending.  When I delete these the rest of the 
messages are processed and the load drops to 0.13.....

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks


Gordon Colyn
InTheNet Technologies
www.itnt.co.za
MSN: gordoncolyn at hotmail.com
SKYPE: gordoncolyn