Please allow me to report about an "Out of memory" case which occured on a system here.
RedHat Linux 9.0, all available patches applied amavisd-new-20030616-p6 SpamAssassin version 2.60 The problem becomes known as the system was not more operable because of nearly infinite swapping activities. "Out of memory" messages related to amavisd appears on the console but login is not more possible. The system must be booted in order to have a chance to log in. I have spent many time to the analyse in order to find what is occuring. No useful entries were found in the log file. When amavisd was started, the amount of used memory was growing continously while the amount of CPU time used varied. If the available amount of memory was sufficient, amavisd started the children processes some time later but the large amount of used memory was not released. Some time later all activities were blocked because no more memory was available. Using gdb and lsof I could find that the problem occured while amavisd had opened bayes_toks and bayes_seen. Later these files were not more used but the memory space were not released. I was surprised to seen that bayes_toks was very large, about 140 MB. I tryed to start sa-learn with the debug and --force-expire options. sa-learn reported that the db is fishy but continued to run. After some time sa-learn stopped but bayes_toks was still very large. A new sa-learn run showed the same behaviour. The problem disappeared only after I had deleted the Bayes_* files. Here some remarks, from my own point of view: I think that the SA procedures should not allocated memory in a non controlled manner. I think that when the SA procedures encounter errors or unusual situations, they should send a comprehensive report which should appear in the log file and they should give an appropriate return code the the calling amavisd. amavisd should take appropriate measures to release memory after the starting procedure using SA. Best regards, Claude ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials. Become an expert in LINUX or just sharpen your skills. Sign up for IBM's Free Linux Tutorials. Learn everything from the bash shell to sys admin. Click now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1278&alloc_id=3371&op=click _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
