[Mimedefang] Rapidly exhausting all slaves

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Thu Jan 23 15:47:01 EST 2003


On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Brian Landers wrote:

> I'm seeing some very odd symptoms on my inbound mail relays.  From time
> to time, something appears to cause slaves to hang in rapid succession.
> First, all available slaves become busy one after the other, then the
> multiplexor starts spawning more slaves which immediately become busy.
> This continues until it his the maximum number of slaves, at which point
> it starts tempfailing mail.

It sounds like someone is mailbombing you.  To know for sure, use
the "-k" option on mimedefang -- that will keep any messages that time
out.  You can then run mimedefang.pl by hand to see if it's something
weird with the message, or just a mail bomb.

Is there any other process that could be sucking up CPU time periodically?
Is there some automated process somewhere that sends you lots of mail
at one time?

The best tuning suggestion I can offer is to put /var/spool/MIMEDefang
on a tmpfs file system, if you haven't already done it.  You might also want
to look at Sendmail's ConnectionRateThrottle setting.

Regards,

David.



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