On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Julian C. Dunn wrote:
What is happening, though, is that whenever anyone sends us huge files
(seven megabytes and up), the carboning causes procmail to allocate the
system's ENTIRE address space (some 48 MB, including the 32 MB of swap
that never gets used otherwise), thereby hanging the mail server for
several hours.
This is an artifact (and a dangerous one) of procmail's design: it places
the entire message in memory to work on, with some bloat. Hence, without
message-size limits in place, you can literally nuke a system without much
work (one reasonably-sized autocad document will do nicely ;-).
I'd love to have a procmailrc-compatible mail filter which did disk-based
file operations. Yes, deliveries would slow down. Yes, I might need more
disk space. Frankly, disk is cheap. Memory, while cheaper than before,
still isn't what I'd call cheap. ;-) And if the memory is there, most
reasonable operating systems will handle memory file caching anyway. I
just don't like the idea of thrashing to death until all available memory
is gone when someone mails their friend a copy of the GIF photo album
they've been putting together.
--
-------------------. emarshal at logic.net .---------------------------------
Edward S. Marshall `-----------------------' http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/
Linux labyrinth 2.1.108 #4 SMP Mon Jul 6 14:49:37 CDT 1998 i586 unknown
9:20pm up 8 days, 6:17, 3 users, load average: 0.04, 0.11, 0.09