procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: Coredump on large emails

2001-12-05 10:36:28

Tuc wrote:
[...]

      But we seem to be getting a LARGE email :

-rw-------  1 root  wheel  9470876 Dec  4 17:44 dffB4MiIx08440


      And its undeliverable due to :

Mmailer prog died with signal 11 (core dumped)


      running gdb on it is useless, since it doesn't have any debug
in the build.

This oversight could be fixed by recompiling procmail with debugging
info. and perhaps installing it some place under your home directory. :)

Another contributor suggested running procmail with the verbose logging
option, something along these lines:

LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log
VERBOSE=yes

(The choice of LOGFILE is arbitrary.)

Our messages file contains :

Dec  4 22:39:25 lif procmail[12284]: Out of memory as I tried
to allocate 8212994 bytes

That's only 8 megs. So either procmail has already allocated a lot of
memory, or something caused procmail to already allocate a lot more.

Have you looked at your user limits? When I try this on my Linux box, I
get the following:

% limit
cputime         unlimited
filesize        unlimited
datasize        unlimited
stacksize       8192 kbytes
coredumpsize    unlimited
memoryuse       unlimited
descriptors     1024
memorylocked    unlimited
maxproc         3583
openfiles       1024

That stack size limit of 8 megs. looks suspicious.  Does procmail use
alloca (I'm too lazy to look for the source right now)?

A quick check of the procmail mailing list archive at:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/

with the keyword 'ulimit' (without the quotes) shows up several messages
which seem to imply that sendmail might be running the local mailer
program with a modest set of memory limits.


On Source Forge, there's this little utility,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctk-ulimitw/

"Ulimitw in an ulimit wrapper. Ulimitw is a C program that has been made
in order to wrap procmail's max filesize delivery limit but could be
used with any program."

Looks like someone may have gone down this path before.  Might be worth
checking out.



_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail