From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Daniel W" Subject: Sendmail Thrashing CPU Endlessly Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 12:32:35 +0100 Sender: linux-admin-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: Return-path: List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-admin@vger.kernel.org Extract from "top": =============================== 12:10pm up 4 days, 27 min, 1 user, load average: 1.24, 1.37, 1.23 82 processes: 76 sleeping, 5 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 4.4% user, 0.5% system, 0.0% nice, 8.3% idle Mem: 262144K av, 258592K used, 3552K free, 17440K shrd, 0K buff Swap: 262144K av, 3704K used, 258440K free 146500K cache PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 20144 root 13 0 2656 2656 1904 R 94.5 1.0 28:34 sendmail 23448 root 3 0 1096 1096 832 R 5.6 0.4 0:00 top =============================== You can see from the above that the sendmail process is hogging virtually the entire CPU. This goes on permanently (this extract is actually soon after i killed the sendmail process - if I didn't it would go on forever). I am running a mail server with perhaps 1000 users but I still don't see why this would cause sendmail to have to operate THIS hard. The problem is that whilst sendmail is doing this the load average slowely climbs. I've had load averages of 40+ and long before that services start to die. All horribly messy. If anyone could give me a few clues as to what could be causing this I'd be most grateful! Sendmail version is: Sendmail 8.11.6/8.11.6 Red Hat Linux release 7.1 (Seawolf) Thanks, Daniel