Dear readers,
Has anyone seen this problem with procmail before? Apparently, about
once a month or so, a bunch of procmail processes bog down the mail server and
make it generally unusable for its other tasks (such as accepting socket
connections to receive new mail).
This occurs about once a month or so. A colleague of mine is guessing
that procmail goes haywire when it encounters certain large (i.e. > 1 megabyte)
pieces of electronic mail -- possibly things like Microsoft exchange e-mail
with large attachments, etc.
At any rate, our problems with procmail have caused us to have to
stop using it until we can figure why all these procmail processes stick
around and tie up the machine.
Has anyone encountered this problem before?
Someone in my office wrote:
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The load average on [machine-name] is currently > 30. Sendmail on that system
is configured to start refusing connections at 24.
SAs, can you please take a look?
The problem is caused by procmail.
John, et al: Please stop using procmail to filter your mail at once. Using it
has caused us problems many times in the past. I'm afraid I do not have an
alternative to offer, you may want to check the mail filtering faq for
alternatives:
http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news/faq/archive/mail.filtering-faq.html
In order that we can start receiving mail reliably I have moved your .forward
to .forward.old.
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The mail server in question runs SunOS 4.1.3:
$ uname -a
SunOS <machine-name> 4.1.3 1 sun4m
Here's the version information for procmail. Could the problem stem
from the fact that it's pulling in /usr/lib/libc.so.1.8 rather than
/usr/lib/libc.so.1.9?
$ /opt/local/bin/procmail -v
ld.so: warning: /usr/lib/libc.so.1.8 has older revision than expected
9
procmail v3.10 1994/10/31 written and created by Stephen R. van den
Berg
berg(_at_)pool(_dot_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de
Submit questions/answers to the procmail-related mailinglist by
sending to:
procmail(_at_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de
And of course, subscription and information requests for this list
to:
procmail-request(_at_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de
Locking strategies: dotlocking, fcntl(), lockf(), flock()
Default rcfile: $HOME/.procmailrc
System mailbox: /usr/spool/mail/$LOGNAME
Thanks,
--
John Davison
john(_dot_)davison(_at_)gs(_dot_)com