sendmail-msp Problem

[Oswald-Kolle]

Hi,

I am running Zimbra 3.1.4 for about three months on a dedicated server with 2.6.2-Debian-3sarge1 installed.
Everything is working fine (okay - no status mails after the first day, but this is discussed and fixed in the next release I think)...

My Problem: The CPU-Load Average is getting higher each hour.... And "top" shows me a couple of sendmail-msp threads (I don't know who started them) - so my question is: Is it possible that zimbra starts these threads and can't terminate them (independant of the reason for this) or does this have nothing to do with the zimbra-server? (Then I would easily kill that process and that's it...)

The server (1GHz, 512MB) is really quick enough - but only for the first days.... :-(

I hope you could help?!

Regards,
Mario

[phoenix]

Well, you're a bit low on the memory requirements for zimbra as it does use lots of it. Can you see who those sendmail instances belong to?

[Oswald-Kolle]

Well... There won't be many users (less than 10) so it should be enough (as it is after a reboot of the maschine)..

This is what "top" has shown yesterday soon after a reboot (about 2 hours)

23727 smmsp 18 0 6900 2832 5648 D 9.6 0.5 1:37.32 sendmail-msp
11880 smmsp 19 0 12476 8320 5648 D 9.2 1.6 14:21.23 sendmail-msp
5435 smmsp 18 0 12476 8480 5648 D 7.6 1.6 17:00.10 sendmail-msp
21108 smmsp 18 0 7340 3252 5648 D 6.3 0.6 3:49.81 sendmail-msp
18484 smmsp 18 0 7860 3848 5648 D 5.3 0.7 5:09.06 sendmail-msp
14840 smmsp 18 0 8792 4512 5648 D 2.6 0.9 3:21.77 sendmail-msp

Do you need other informations?!

Mario

[Oswald-Kolle]

Hmm... I think I found the problem but no good result for this...

I run a fetchmail (described in another thread here) every 3 minutes started by a cron job - and don't know whether some of them won't finish... But I don't know why they should persist in the thread list...
I made a workaround and "killall sendmail-msp" every 30 minutes... Not nice and maybe a little dangerous, but it works and the cpu load average is less than 5% again.....

But it would be nice if anyone has a better way for doing this....

[phoenix]

Fetchmail will only fallback to using sendmail if it can't make a connection to port 25, fetchmail on your machine shouldn't be using sendmail at all. I suppose you could test that by stopping zimbra and running your fetchmail and seeing if it invokes sendmail. If it does that it would, to me, imply that it can't get to port 25 sometimes.

I would also suggest that every three minutes is rather a short space between executions especially if any of the mailboxes you're collecting from have lots of mail to download. Nobody needs mail that often, I'd suggest running it every 10 minutes.

[Oswald-Kolle]

Me again,

I stopped my "fetchmail-cron-jobs" and rebooted the system - but there are still "sendmail-msp" threads and they are still getting more!
How is that possible? There is nothing else running on that mashine except Zimbra...
Is it possible that these Jobs are still there because of too less RAM or CPU-Power? (It's running on a 512MB Ram/P3-1000 System).

I know that it's not nice - but killing these threads (killall sendmail-msp) every 30 Minutes with a cron job works and the load average keeps less than 5%...

Mario

[phoenix]

I can't imagine why sendmail is running, it's nothing to do with zimbra and it's not used by zimbra. Are you absolutely sure that there's nothing using it in your system? Have you tried renaming the sendmail executable and see what fails or messages are produced? Are you sure that it's not set to run at any time in cron?

[Oswald-Kolle]

Well... I will check the Crontabs this evening and post the result of it... (But I don't believe that there is something in it using the sendmail... Unless the "normal Debian installation" is trying to send anything....)

Mario

[phoenix]

I don't know anything about debian but is it possible that debian sends admin mail using sendmail?

[Oswald-Kolle]

Originally Posted by phoenix

I don't know anything about debian but is it possible that debian sends admin mail using sendmail?

That is possible... Of course... It's my first Debian PC also - so I cannot say anything to that...
But when it does - what could I do then? I already made an alias for root before I saw those "sendmail-msp" threads...