No problems, but a solution for those who might be experiencing a
problem.
A few months ago I installed a new Dec Unix 3.2G Alpha box (1000A, RAID,
5/400 CPU). This machine was to be the main relay and mail hub for the
college. I grabbed the sources for Sendmail 8.8.5 (current at the time
- around July) and life was good.
Last week we ran into some major performance problems. This was probably
due to students and faculty use of email increasing. In any case, people
could not make smtp, pop or imap connections to the server and the
server itself was having trouble.
I noticed that Sendmail had spawned off a *large* number of child processes,
(around 40 or more!) mainly to deal with stuff in the queue (which had
grown like a family of rabbits). This also had a major impact on ypserv,
as yserv was consuming roughly 25% of the cpu. Under vmstat, the cpu
was spending 95%-97% of it's time in System and the rest in User. There
was no Idle time at all.
The only thing I could do was upgrade Sendmail to 8.8.7 (now current) and
that seemed to fix the problems. Check out the release notes in the
Sendmail distribution - there's a number of bug fixes in regards to
spawning, race conditions and the like.
I hope this helps someone out there...
--
Rob Naccarato "I know I'm a lot of feathers,
Sys Admin but not much chicken."
Sheridan College -KM
Oakville, Ont. Canada
Received on Wed Oct 22 1997 - 17:59:51 NZDT