On 28 January 1999, Professional Software Engineering
<PSE-L(_at_)mail(_dot_)professional(_dot_)org> wrote:
[...]
There is an additional option:
(4) rewrite procmail to reduce number of concurrent processes,
possibly via a lock mechanism of some sort -- this would reduce memory
consumption from multiple messages being handled by procmail on the
system at the same time, and I'd imagine also issues with the COPY
flag (of course, it also reduces your ability to use it in complex
fashion).
[...]
This is really _much_ better done at MTA level, simply because the
MTA can do a better accounting of what it's spawning and when. When the
message has reached procmail you already lost, because you don't have
any control of what happens with messages for other users.
Now, sendmail is supposed to have a kind of load balance control
(although I never bothered to understand how that works), but I'd
recommend switching to Postfix instead: it uses much less resources than
sendmail, and it's far easier to configure. As somebody else already
mentioned, using Maildrop instead of procmail might be a good idea too,
since it never loads the whole message into memory (not to mention the
saner syntax :-)).
Regards,
Liviu Daia
--
Dr. Liviu Daia e-mail: daia(_at_)stoilow(_dot_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy PGP key: http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc