The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, November 05, 2007

And I thought I was being extravagant for using 20 megabytes for the greylist daemon

As if the problems I'm having getting the greylist daemon 64-bit clean and less Linux-centric weren't bad enough, today I find that the Sendmail client just stopped working. I checked the logs, and sure enough, the milter library is bitching up a storm:

Oct 31 17:32:08 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Oct 31 17:32:44 XXXX last message repeated 5 times
Oct 31 17:33:13 XXXX last message repeated 10 times
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon, mi_rd_cmd: read returned -1: Connection reset by peer
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon, mi_rd_cmd: read returned -1: Connection reset by peer
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Oct 31 17:33:50 XXXX last message repeated 13 times
Oct 31 17:34:52 XXXX last message repeated 28 times
Oct 31 17:35:54 XXXX last message repeated 34 times
Oct 31 17:37:02 XXXX last message repeated 21 times
Oct 31 17:38:05 XXXX last message repeated 7 times
Oct 31 17:39:11 XXXX last message repeated 16 times
Oct 31 17:40:20 XXXX last message repeated 7 times
Oct 31 17:41:31 XXXX last message repeated 8 times
Oct 31 17:41:50 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Nov  1 12:22:53 XXXX smgl: Address: 127.0.0.1:0
Nov  2 19:25:21 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: mi_stop=1
Nov  2 19:27:56 XXXX smc: Address: 0.0.0.0:0

Okay. That mi_stop=1 doesn't look good; let me see what I can find out about that:

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Matt Selsky wrote:

Jul 27 09:12:20 clover mimedefang[22489]: [ID 649295 mail.info] MIMEDefang-2.44: mi_stop=1

This is normal.

Regards,

David.

[Mimedefang] mi_stop=1 message in syslog

Lovely! Not only is it normal, but the only reference I found was dated 2004!

There was nothing at all about mi_rd_cmd returning -1, but I did find the following about the thread_create() failed: 12:

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Stephane Lentz wrote:

PS: a folk running Linux reported a similar problem but he's not runing RH. On Mandrake/SuSE I've never seen it. How much traffic do you process ? Which hardware ? Try to get some recommendations on system tuning from RH since you're paying $$$$ .

Here's some free advice: On RHEL3, type “ulimit -s”:

$ ulimit -s
10240

So each thread wants 10MB of stack space. That can chew up your RAM pretty quickly. I recommend editing the MIMEDefang startup script and putting:

ulimit -s 2048

just before mimedefang (not the multiplexor!) is invoked.

Right now, the sample red hat script does it only if you have more than 100 slaves, but it should really do it unconditionally.

Regards,

David.

[Mimedefang] thread_create errors

Sweet Jesus! No wonder the Sendmail client sucks up memory like there's no tomorrow! Sheesh!

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.