Extremely High Memory Usage for Amavisd

[atomicfission]

Greetings. We are a network edition customer, building a new Zimbra v4 server within VMWare Server v1. The guest O/S is Fedora FC5.

Installation went well, and the server appears to be up and running with just one mailbox at this point. However, we're hitting a major snag with respect to performance. Amavisd appears to be using close to 90% of available memory. Please see below:

Mem: 1035428k total, 1023428k used, 12000k free, 924k buffers
Swap: 3068336k total, 946532k used, 2121804k free, 11948k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
700 zimbra 18 0 1685m 881m 592 D 13.3 87.2 0:26.70 amavisd

In the Admin UI, if I go to servers > my_server and turn off the 'antispam' and 'antivirus' services (then restart zimbra from command line) the system works well, and is quite responsive. Re-enabling these services will bring the machine to a crawl. (I'm seeing 1/5/15 min system uptime values in the 15.0 range.)

I thought there should be $max_servers (per amavisd.conf) pre-forked amavisd children, each using 40MB-ish of RAM each, rather than one monster process using close to a Gig??

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated...

Thanks,
-Dave

[atomicfission]

The Open Source edition built specifically for FC5 works fine...

Going to scrap FC5 and try Network Edition on CentOS 4.4.

[dijichi2]

holy cr$p, that can't be right. iirc amavis master spawns the children which share memory, but a res size of nearly 900mb gotta mean somethings gone horribly wrong...

i wasn't aware fc5 was supported for the network edition, if you're trying to run a different version, say rhel4 version, on fc5, this may have arisen due to some issue with perl libs - amavis does preload a huge amount of perl.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

i wasn't aware fc5 was supported for the network edition

It isn't, a supported operating system is needed and a well specified virtual machine (I would suggest) is also needed.

[bogghed]

I belive the problem resides in the DB_File version used by Zimbra:

Manually running amavisd as the zimbra user results in the following:

./amavisd[16084]: SpamControl: initializing Mail::SpamAssassin
Use of uninitialized value in numeric ge (>=) at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/i386-linux-thread-multi/DB_File.pm line 271.
Use of uninitialized value in numeric gt (>) at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/i386-linux-thread-multi/DB_File.pm line 275.
Deep recursion on subroutine "DB_File::AUTOLOAD" at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/i386-linux-thread-multi/DB_File.pm line 234.

I solved it by prepending the path to my own DB_File in .bashrc in /opt/zimbra:

PERLLIB=/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi:/opt/zi...

Apart from this the only fixes I did was the normal libssl linking fix for fc5 (but linking to libssl.so.4) to get LDAP to play ball.

Regards,
Erik