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Date:      Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:50:36 +0200
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <charon@hades.hell.gr>
To:        Allen Hyer <allenh@wtrt.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Sendmail problem - lots of processes
Message-ID:  <20000114175036.A6800@hades.hell.gr>
In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000111111529.01640710@wtrt.net>
References:  <4.2.0.58.20000111111529.01640710@wtrt.net>

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2000 at 11:20:38AM -0600, Allen Hyer wrote:
> Hello,
>    I am having a problem with sendmail on 3.3-Release.  After sendmail has 
> run awhile (as a daemon), I find that there are many processes started by 
> sendmail, roughly 150.  The processes look like this under ps ax:
> 
> 51275  ??  S      0:00.42 sendmail: startup with 12.19.232.12 (sendmail)
> 51309  ??  S      0:00.42 sendmail: startup with 12.19.232.12 (sendmail)
> 53080  ??  S      0:00.33 sendmail: startup with 207.245.62.161 (sendmail)
> 53103  ??  S      0:00.34 sendmail: startup with 207.245.62.161 (sendmail)
> 
> After a few hours, there will be about 150 of these, to 5 or 6 different 
> IP's.  Just wondering if anyone knows what could be causing this.

What do these 5-6 IP's have in common?  Can you ping them?  Do they
reply with a working SMTP server when you telnet to their port 25?

If you find out that they take an absurdly long time to reply, then
that's the reason you're seeing all those sendmail's instances trying
these hosts.  It seems that the hosts take longer to reply than it
takes for your sendmail to rerun the queue, or something like that.

Perhaps you could limit the number of active sendmail processes, so
that those hosts staying down will not bring you down with a zillion of
sendmail's running on your machine :-)

Look at /usr/src/contrib/sendmail/cf/README the explanations of the
options:

	confMAX_DAEMON_CHILDREN
	confCONNECTION_RATE_THROTTLE

Ciao.

-- 
Giorgos Keramidas, < keramida @ ceid . upatras . gr >
"What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." [Aristotle]


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