[Mimedefang] Strange Error in MD 2.24

[David F. Skoll]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Matt A. Gargett wrote:

> Every payday we send out an email to our customers that dumps about 3000
> emails in about a minute to my mail server.  The load jumps up (and it's Xeon
> 2 GHZ with 2GB ram) and the MTA stops accepting messages.  What kind of
> multiplextor settings do you think I should have?

Well, a deeper question is why you scan that kind of outbound mail?
Wouldn't it be more efficient not to even have MIMEDefang look at
those outbound messages?

You can try increasing the maximum number of slaves (MX_MAXIMUM in
the standard startup scripts), but scanning 3000 mails/minute will kill
your machine no matter what you do.  You simply cannot scan and deliver
an e-mail in 20 milliseconds on your hardware.

> I also see the following error in my maillog:

> Nov  8 13:26:53 inet-prime mimedefang[767]: Could not create
> /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mdefang-3DCC01ED-5: Too many open files

This is a symptom of too many connections.  You might want to lower
MaxDaemonChildren in your Sendmail config file.

--
David.