Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:56:51 +1030 From: Greg Hurrell <greg@hurrell.cc> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: SpamAssassin spawned 700 perl processes Message-ID: <6A4FC9DF-248E-11D7-93AF-000393BC25EC@hurrell.cc>
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Weird thing happened today to my mail server (FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p2 #6: Thu Nov 14 21:42:32 CST 2002). After 55 days of uptime, the machine suddenly went down like a town of bricks. It appears that over a period of several hours, several hundred perl processes built up -- all running either spamc or spamd (from SpamAssassin). Here's the first part of the output of "top -u" which I managed to snag before the machine finally died: > last pid: 47611; load averages: 2.86, 2.30, 2.29 up 56+14:46:56 > 12:52:17 > 652 processes: 1 running, 651 sleeping > CPU states: 51.0% user, 0.0% nice, 8.6% system, 1.0% interrupt, > 39.4% idle > Mem: 329M Active, 36M Inact, 118M Wired, 15M Cache, 60M Buf, 992K Free > Swap: 1024M Total, 961M Used, 63M Free, 93% Inuse, 48K In, 740K Out > > PID UID PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU > COMMAND > 80276 0 2 0 3028K 1192K select 5:38 1.07% 1.07% named > 44480 0 2 0 24344K 7020K connec 1:06 0.39% 0.39% perl > 47145 0 2 0 22208K 7268K connec 0:45 0.34% 0.34% perl > 43834 0 2 0 24832K 7084K connec 1:08 0.29% 0.29% perl > 44995 0 2 0 24280K 7236K connec 1:02 0.29% 0.29% perl > 43996 0 2 0 24668K 7032K connec 1:08 0.24% 0.24% perl > 44841 0 2 0 24724K 7292K connec 1:05 0.24% 0.24% perl > 44280 0 2 0 24672K 7228K connec 1:07 0.20% 0.20% perl And here is a partial sample from "ps auxww": > 1002 44851 0.0 0.0 628 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 sh -c > /usr/bin/spamc > 1002 44852 0.0 0.0 2268 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 > /usr/bin/spamc > nobody 44853 0.1 1.4 24496 7196 ?? SJ 7:19AM 1:04.03 > /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/spamd -x -i 203.2.192.76 -A 203.2.192.76 -r > /var/run/spamd.pid -d > 1002 44875 0.0 0.0 628 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 sh -c > /usr/bin/spamc > 1002 44876 0.0 0.0 2268 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 > /usr/bin/spamc > nobody 44877 0.0 1.4 24412 7108 ?? SJ 7:24AM 1:03.90 > /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/spamd -x -i 203.2.192.76 -A 203.2.192.76 -r > /var/run/spamd.pid -d > 1002 44887 0.0 0.0 628 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 sh -c > /usr/bin/spamc > 1002 44888 0.0 0.0 2268 0 ?? IWJ - 0:00.00 > /usr/bin/spamc > nobody 44889 0.0 1.4 24292 7100 ?? SJ 7:24AM 1:02.23 > /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/spamd -x -i 203.2.192.76 -A 203.2.192.76 -r > /var/run/spamd.pid -d Except of course, that this went on for hundreds and hundreds of lines... The machine eventually got so bogged down that I couldn't even ssh into it, although I could still ping it. After a reboot I disabled spamassassin and now I am looking for answers as to why this suddenly occurred after 55 days of uptime (and before that, months of trouble-free operation interrupted only by reboots for security updates). What might have caused spamassassin to spawn so many processes? (By way of information I am running courier with a .courier file containing | /usr/local/bin/maildrop and a .mailfilter file containing: xfilter "/usr/bin/spamc" for each mail account on the system. I start *one* spamd process from /usr/local/etc/rc.d/spamd.sh at boot time, so I have no idea why I had so many of these processes spawn at around 7:20 AM this morning... all of them launched by "/usr/bin/perl" which I find to be a little odd! My /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf file contains very little: only this: > subject_tag [---SPAM---] > spam_level_char . > report_header 1 > use_terse_report 1 > defang_mime 0 > header WHITELISTED_DELIVERY_STATUS From =~ /"Courier mail server > at rivendell.unixhosts.net" <\@>/ > describe WHITELISTED_DELIVERY_STATUS From: indicates delivery > status message > score WHITELISTED_DELIVERY_STATUS -2.0 ...) Any ideas for why this might have happened, and how I can prevent it in the future? I don't really want to turn off spamassassin forever because I quite like it! Cheers :-) Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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