[Mimedefang] MD consuming all memory...

[Ken Morley]

Matthew:

Thanks very much for the suggestion, but I already tried that.  If I set Min
& Max slaves both to 1, the slave that spawns will consume all memory.

I've troubleshot a little further and I beleive the problem is related to
the blacklist files \etc\mail\spamassassin\sa-blacklist.cf &
sa-blacklist-uri.cf.  These files are large: 4.5MB and 1.2MB respectively.
If I move those files, create new empties & reboot, the server seems to
behave normally.  Configured with Min slaves 2 and max slaves 10, the
multiplexor will spawn 2 slaves.  These slaves appear in top for about two
minutes during initialization, as they consume about 98% of CPU and slowly
count up to an RSS of about 70MB each.  Then they stabilize and everything
is fine (over 128MB of free memory on the system).

Putting the original sa-blacklist files back & restarting, I see the
behaviour return: the slaves spawn and, after about 5 minutes, they've
consumed all memory.

This brings up a couple of questions:

The blacklist files have been static since the server was installed.  Why
would MD have a problem with these all of a sudden?

Assuming that the MD slaves cache the entries in the blacklist files, it
seems as if the slaves would need an additional 6MB each.  Why does this
make the slaves bottomless pits?

Thanks again for your suggestions and any help you can provide!

Ken Morley
ken at jmtg.com