Re: [Fwd: sendmail fails to deliver mail with attachments in /var/spool/mqueue]

Richard B. Johnson
2000-11-10T20:08:26Z

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 12:34:40PM -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> >
> > Andrea,
> >
> > All done. It's already setup this way.
>
> Ok. So please now show a tcpdump trace during the `sendmail -q` so we can see
> what's going wrong in the TCP connection to the smtp server:
>
> tcpdump port smtp
>
> Andrea

I tried to send Jeff a 45 Megabyte file. It is still in the queue.

FLAGS UID PID PPID PRI NI SIZE RSS WCHAN STA TTY TIME COMMAND
[SNIPPED...]

140 0 82 1 9 0 840 100 do_select S ?
0:00 /usr/sbin/rpc.pcnfsd /var/spool/lpd
140 0 86 1 8 0 1744 364 do_select S ?
0:00 sendmail: accepting connections
40 0 5742 1 16 0 1812 136 wait_for_tc S ? 0:01
sendmail: ./eAAJm8V05731 vger.timpanogas.org.: client DATA 354

It isn't a TCP/IP stack problem. It may be a memory problem. Every time
sendmail spawns a child to send the file data, it crashes. That's
why the file never gets sent!

This is how /proc/meminfo looks right after it crashes. There has
been a lot of swapping going on.

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 328114176 38932480 289181696 0 2293760 27115520
Swap: 139821056 10014720 129806336
MemTotal: 320424 kB
MemFree: 282404 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 2240 kB
Cached: 26484 kB
Active: 5576 kB
Inact_dirty: 18348 kB
Inact_clean: 4800 kB
Inact_target: 332 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 320424 kB
LowFree: 282400 kB
SwapTotal: 136544 kB
SwapFree: 126764 kB

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.0 on an i686 machine (799.54 BogoMips).

"Memory is like gasoline. You use it up when you are running. Of
course you get it all back when you reboot..."; Actual explanation
obtained from the Micro$oft help desk.