Re: start multiple sendmail daemons from rc.conf?

From: Andy Farkas (andyf_at_speednet.com.au)
Date: 11/25/03

  • Next message: Chris Cook: "Re: start multiple sendmail daemons from rc.conf?" 
    Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 07:23:24 +1000 (EST)
To: Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.com>

    Bill Vermillion wrote:

    > > >So even though sendmail says it is rejecting connections
    > > >(twice!), it then goes and accepts two more! Grrr.
    >
    > Well it's sort of hard to let the far systems know they shouldn't
    > be sending any. If you look at the config file you will see that
    > when sendmail reaches a certain limit it will not accept any more
    > connections. So your resources are too low [as noted in the other
    > poster comment below] as you run out of resources before you hit
    > the limit that is in Sendmail. [see your .cf file and you could
    > set the load average where you just queue messages and the point
    > where you reject messages lower]
    >
    > > Thrash is correct and it would appear it happening from the
    > > messages above. Sendmail checks the load average each time a new
    > > request is received. If the average is above the threshold it
    > > puts out that message and doesn't handle the request. Obviously,
    > > when PIDs 71848 and 71861 were started the load average was
    > > below the threshold. Running out of swap space is never going to
    > > be a good thing. You need more memory or more swap space.
    >
    > Unless he's modified the sendmail.cf for different load values
    > and moved them too high, then he probably needs both more memory
    > and more swap space. And of course more memory means you need to
    > add more swap space.
    >
    > Until he gets more memory he can add swap space - man 8 swapon -
    > but to blame sendmail for an under powered or mis-configured system
    > is wrong.

    I know exactly what happened to my system. I was there watching it self
    destruct. But the beauty of FreeBSD is its stability; the box is still
    running and hasn't even been rebooted.

    Yep, it needs more RAM and more swap. But that aint gonna happen :)

    Some background on my setup: sendmail, procmail, bogofilter, and
    amavis/uvscan. sendmail receives a message, sends it to amavis which
    spawns a uvscan, then procmail bogofilters it. Works well, but is rather
    resource intensive (and as you've noticed, this box is under-resourced).

    If I disconnect from the 'Net for a few hours, mail gets queued upstream,
    and when I reconnect, vast quantities of email come in all at once
    spawning hundreds of processes. (the poo hits the fan at around 300 procs)

    My sendmail.cf has this in it:

    O QueueLA=3
    O RefuseLA=4
    O DelayLA=2
    O MaxDaemonChildren=16
    O ConnectionRateThrottle=3

    but the situation can still occur :) 

    --
 :{ andyf@speednet.com.au
        Andy Farkas
    System Administrator
   Speednet Communications
 http://www.speednet.com.au/
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  • Next message: Chris Cook: "Re: start multiple sendmail daemons from rc.conf?"

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