procmail
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Re: Coredump on large emails

2001-12-06 16:56:25

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

        Understood, but I figure the output in syslog (Out of mem...)
might be enough...

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.)

        Even after seeing the "Out of memory..."?

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)?

        Does it run with the limits of the USER, or the sendmail/root/mail?

        The user doesn't have a valid shell, but as a normal user, with
csh, I get :

lif: {444} % limit
coredumpsize    unlimited
cputime         unlimited
datasize        16384 kbytes
filesize        unlimited
maxproc         64 
memorylocked    85092 kbytes
memoryuse       255272 kbytes
openfiles       64 
stacksize       2048 kbytes

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.

        2M perhaps in our case?


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.

        Unfortuantely, its not portable enough, won't compile on 
BSD/OS.  GRRR... 

        But its basically hitting the user limit?

                Tuc/TTSG Internet Services, Inc.
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