[Mimedefang] Problem with MD 2.4 - too many open files?

[Alberto.daSilva at rmb.co.za]

>> Do you think the mixed compiler versions is causing
>>
>>      mimedefang[11167]:[mail.warning] Could not create
>>      /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mdefang-3DCA3219-0: Too many open files
>>
>> error?
>>
>> The "Too many open files" problem seems to be in the "mimdefang.c"
milter.
>
>I had the same problem on my server (Solaris 7)
>
>It was solved by moving the proxyserver software (which was on the same
>server) to another server...
>
>Have you got other "heavy" applications on this server ?
>
>Karel

No there are no other apps, just sendmail, MD 2.24, SpamAssisin, ClamAV

The server is an old Sun UltraSparc 1, 167Mhz with 384MB RAM, 2xSCSI 18G
disks.
We will be upgrading to an Sun V100.

We process about 11,000 incomming e-mails per day with a
CPU load of CPU 50-70% during busy periods.

The problem seems to have been resolved by increasing the
soft limit on files "ulimit -Sn 512"

Using lsof (as previously suggested) I see that mimedefang.c opens:
     1 socket /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang.sock
     4+ files /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mdefang-3DD12C76-0/INPUTMSG, HEADERS,
etc
per connection/slave.

This exeeded the soft ulimit on open files when we had a lot of concurrent
sessions.

You should probably set ulimit -Sn to MAX_SLAVES*6 or 7

An alternative would be to reduce MaxDaemonChildren/MaxQueueChildren in
sendmail
(was also suggested).

Thanks

Alberto