Milter-greylist

milter-greylist sometimes spawns hundreds of processes that don't
terminate, consuming all memory then crashing the server.  Usually
it has 5-10 processes.  Sunday processes proliferated, a few more
every 5 minutes (a crontab job captures a snapshot of 'top' every 5
minutes), until there were 264 greylist processes then the server
crashed.  mail traffic had not increased.  maillog and greylist.log
don't record anything unusual happening - nothing different than
the usual day that has no problems and no time when greylist
has more than 20 processes at any one time.

What would cause this?  Can I configure milter-greylist to use
only a maximum number of processes?  Would restarting
milter-greylist dump old processes?

Russell Bell <russellbell@...> wrote:

> What would cause this?  Can I configure milter-greylist to use
> only a maximum number of processes?  Would restarting
> milter-greylist dump old processes?

The only situation where milter-greylist forks is when you use the
urlcheck feature with the fork option (look for "fork" in
greylist.conf). 

If this is not your situation, then my second guess is that you are
running on an OS that shows all threads as processes. If this is the
case, then you have one thread per SMTP connexion. If your server is
busy, it can climb quite high.

Third idea: you have a script that restart it even if it did not die.
-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz
manu@...