[exim] Exim 4.52 and SA 3.0.4 memory problem

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Author: srunschke
Date:  
To: Exim Users Mailing List
Subject: [exim] Exim 4.52 and SA 3.0.4 memory problem
Greetings list,

following system is behaving very strange:

RH Enterprise Linux 4
Exim 4.52
SA 3.0.4

After upgrading exim from 4.43 to 4.52 today, the memory usage
from _SpamAssassin_ skyrocketed. And it skyrocketed that much
and so fast that I had to do a hardware-reboot after like 1 hour.
Mind you, that machine has 2 Gig physical and 4 Gig swap ram.

I was barely able to get a ps axu to see that all of my 25 spamd
instances were hogging around 500mb ram each. Sadly the kernel
started to kill random applications to free memory then and I lost the
machine.

I have now reduced the spamd instances to 10 on all servers to
reduce the chance of the system running out of memory, but that
shouldn't be an issue normally since they are well suited for
their job.

With exim 4.43 this behaviour does not occur.

Top from another mx with the same setup, but still running exim 4.43:

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
19462 root      16   0 53072  46m 2940 S  0.0  2.3   0:02.26 spamd
19463 root      16   0 48056  41m 2940 S  0.0  2.1   0:01.67 spamd
19466 root      16   0 39520  33m 2940 S  0.0  1.6   0:01.95 spamd
19471 root      17   0 34880  28m 2940 S  0.0  1.4   0:01.61 spamd
19465 root      16   0 33424  27m 2944 S  0.0  1.4   0:01.27 spamd
19469 root      17   0 33232  27m 2940 S  0.0  1.3   0:01.31 spamd
19468 root      17   0 32540  26m 2932 S  0.0  1.3   0:00.78 spamd
19470 root      16   0 32488  26m 2932 S  0.0  1.3   0:00.65 spamd
19464 root      17   0 32476  26m 2940 S  0.0  1.3   0:01.06 spamd
19467 root      16   0 32296  26m 2932 S  0.0  1.3   0:00.55 spamd
19458 root      25   0 31152  25m 2856 S  0.0  1.2   0:00.48 spamd


Top from the today updated mx with exim 4.52 (freshly restarted
spamassassin and exim like 30 minutes ago):

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3386 root      16   0  189m 184m 2944 S  0.0  9.1   0:07.24 spamd
 3384 root      16   0 69480  63m 2944 S  0.0  3.1   0:03.69 spamd
 3387 root      16   0 51984  46m 2944 S  0.0  2.3   0:02.89 spamd
 3381 root      16   0 45404  39m 2944 S  0.0  2.0   0:03.83 spamd
 3383 root      16   0 45300  39m 2948 S  0.0  2.0   0:06.71 spamd
 3382 root      17   0 42120  36m 2944 S  0.0  1.8   0:03.06 spamd
 3380 root      16   0 35788  30m 2948 S  0.0  1.5   0:02.61 spamd
 3389 root      16   0 35700  30m 2944 S  0.0  1.5   0:01.81 spamd
 3385 root      17   0 35464  30m 2940 S  0.0  1.5   0:02.19 spamd
 3388 root      16   0 33660  28m 2944 S  0.0  1.4   0:01.99 spamd
 3375 root      25   0 30332  25m 2860 S  0.0  1.2   0:00.46 spamd


As you can see, spamd is already starting to hog memory again.
There are no current tcp connections from exim to spamd at that
very moment, so it can't result from a hanging tcp-session.

I have no clue who to blame and where to actually start searching
for the problem. I know that SpamAssassin is the memory hog,
but obviously, for some strange reason, exim seems to trigger
that problem.

Does anyone have a hint where to start digging?

sash

--------------------------------------------------
Sascha Runschke
Netzwerk Administration
IT-Services

ABIT AG
Robert-Bosch-Str. 1
40668 Meerbusch

Tel.:+49 (0) 2150.9153.226
Mobil:+49 (0) 173.5419665
mailto:SRunschke@abit.de

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