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Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 20:03:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom <tom@uniserve.com>
To: Joseph Stein <joes@spiritone.com>
cc: brian@awfulhak.org, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Earlier problems with ppp and 'Too many open files'
In-Reply-To: <199707022102.OAA00603@joes.users.spiritone.com>
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On Wed, 2 Jul 1997, Joseph Stein wrote:

> >   Since it seems to happen while doing a "make world", it shouldn't be a
> > problem, because most people login to do a make world.
> 
> Well, I've done some more investigation.
> 
> Like I indicated before, this is a single-user machine.  However, 
> I do the following from /etc/rc:
> 
> -- start userland PPP
> -- start fetchmail-3.9.8
> 
> So, on boot-up, fetchmail forces the connection to my ISP (desired
> action), and transfers mail.
> 
> I just recently enabled FEATURE(local_procmail) in sendmail (thinking
> that maybe the problems with 'unable to fork' were because I was
> calling procmail from my .forward file).
> 
> When I reconnected (just to get make world done without a hitch, which it
> did (finally)), I had 145 messages in my queue.
> 
> Guess what?
> 
> While sendmail/procmail were digesting the inbound mail, I got
> 
> Out of processes
> 
> So now, I'm off to find out what to tweak to increase the number of
> available processes and see if that takes care of the problem.
> 
> joe
> 

  Your fetchmail-sendmail-procmail system probably forks two processes for
each message, all at once.

Tom