[Mimedefang] strange problems with MD 2.61

[Jan-Pieter Cornet]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 07:21:47AM +0900, alan premselaar wrote:
> >   thanks for the tip.  I turned off embedded perl and some other errors
> > showed up.  Once I fixed those everything started to work again as expected.
> Well, to reply to my own post:
> 
>  I thought everything was working fine, but when I re-enabled embedded
> perl after some time the slaves started dying with signal 14.  If I
> leave embedded perl turned off, it works fine.
> 
> so, does anyone have any ideas why embedded perl might be doing this?

That's an uncaught SIGALRM. I think this issue came up a while ago,
and it had to do with SpamAssassin 3.x and how mimedefang embedded perl
exactly, specifically how it handled signal handlers. You might find
it in the archives. I cannot recall if it was resolved or not.
 
> also, at this point is there still any advantage to using embedded perl
> over not on a somewhat low-volume server? (of course the mail volume
> could grow in a short period of time, so i think I'd like to use
> embedded perl if possible)
> 
> Thoughts?

I haven't experimented a lot with embedded perl, but from the brief
moments I did, about the only advantage is a somewhat reduced memory
usage. We're currently running without embedded perl (also because
it doesn't embed well on FreeBSD 4), and it runs fine. Most of the
memory is taken by stuff like spamassassin rulesets, antivirus, etc.

If you have enough memory, I don't think there's a compelling reason
to use embedded perl. Not performance-wise anyway.

-- 
Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc at xs4all.nl>
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