[Mimedefang] multiple CPUs, multiple milters!

[Anne Bennett]

Folks,

My hardware has two CPUs, seen by the Linux kernel (2.4.21) as four
CPUS -- which is apparently normal for these Intel Xeon processors
with "hyperthreading".  Weird, but the system works fine.

But... when I start up mimedefang (the milter process), I get four of
them!  The PID in the pidfile is that of the first one (lowest PID).

I have not yet tested the set-up hard, though initial light testing shows
MIMEDefang to be working as expected.  So far, the only problem I have
is that during shutdown, killing just the PID registered in the
pidfile is not sufficient to get rid of all four processes.

I will be testing further shortly, but I have a bad feeling about
this; am I really supposed to be getting a milter process for each CPU?
(For example, Tru64Unix does not do this.)  Has anyone else come across
this with Linux on a multi-CPU host?

The milter is started as:

  /local/paths/mimedefang -P /local/var/spam/mimedefang-milter.pid \
    -m /local/var/spam/mimedefang-multiplexor.sock \
    -p /local/var/spam/mimedefang-milter.sock -r -t -k -T -X


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Sysadmin, ENCS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne at encs.concordia.ca                                    +1 514 848-2424 x2285