[Mimedefang] memory leak?

Steffen Kaiser skmimedefang at smail.inf.fh-bonn-rhein-sieg.de
Tue Feb 10 02:19:31 EST 2004


On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Ron Peterson wrote:

> What we have been seeing is that the system's memory useage slowly (over a
> day or two) creeps up to full utilization.  Then the swap space starts
> being used.  I don't know how hard it's getting hit, just that it goes
> from 0% to something slightly more than 0%.

I'd call this normal.
It seems to me that Linux swaps out long-term not used pages in favour of
disk cache buffers: I have an internet router/gateway that never peaks
over its physical RAM (512MB), but has about 120MB swap space in use. The
buffers allocate about 70% of the RAM.

> That would all be o.k., but for the fact that the load average also
> spikes.  We're running a load average just over 1% right now.  The CPUs
> are over 80% idle.  Everything is going full bore.  By tomorrow morning, I
> expect the load average to be over 50, and the CPU idle to be way

My mail server shows this behaviour when the NFS servers times out and the
MDA or the IMAP/POP servers try to access the home directories.
Also, when the DNS server has some problems, sendmail tends to spawn lots
of childs waiting for the DNS response; this seems to pump up the load,
too.

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser



More information about the MIMEDefang mailing list