[Exim] Exim 3.36 memory usage (with lookup ldap)

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Author: Douglas Gray Stephens
Date:  
To: Exim List
Subject: [Exim] Exim 3.36 memory usage (with lookup ldap)
Hi,

Earlier this week I spotted that an instance of exim 3.36 was using
2.5+GB of memory, so I took a closer look.

It turns out that I can reproduce the issue on a machine with less
memory:
exim -bt something@???
Out of memory during "large" request for 528384 bytes.

and if I watch the exim process, it ends up using 5.3GB of memory.

The problem is an ldap lookup, which means that rather than returning
3 matches to the LDAP search, it was returning 3596 records (due to a
bug in the iPlanet 5.1SP2 LDAP server, which SunOne have a hot fix
for).

I have solved my problem by adding a size=2 to my ldap lookups, but I
was surprised that exim uses so much memory while harvesting the LDAP
results (exporting the complete database to an LDIF file is only
about 400MB), and so felt that I should report the issue in case there
is a memory leak within exim's LDAP calls.

I have tested the same lookup in Exim 4, and the process only used
190MB of memory.


Douglas

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================================
Dr. Douglas GRAY STEPHENS
Technical Architect (Directories)
Schlumberger Cambridge Research
High Cross,
Madingley Road,
Cambridge.
CB3 0EL
ENGLAND

Phone  +44 1223 325295
Mobile +44 773 0051628
Fax    +44 1223 311830
Email DGrayStephens@???
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