[ale] procmail using 100's of MB RAM

[James P. Kinney III]

Procmail is what takes the mail from the fetchmail-to-sendmail process
and dumps it into the spools in /var. 

Likely, there is a defective email that has setup a delivery loop. Try
stopping fetchmail, sendmail and then procmail. That should stop the
looping. Then go into the /var/spool area and look in the mqueue.in
directory for problems.

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 02:14 -0600, Joe Knapka wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I just noticed that I have several copies of procmail running on my
> FC3 machine, each of which is using between 60 and 150 *MB* of virtual
> memory. This poor machine only has about 350MB of RAM, and my actual
> tools (emacs, mozilla, etc) spend half their time swapping in and out
> to make room for procmail.  If I kill the procmail processes, they
> immediately start again, and very quickly grow to several tens of MB.
> 
> Any idea what's up with that? I don't (intentionally) use procmail on
> this machine; fetchmail gets my mail for me and dumps it in the spool
> directories, and emacs sucks it out of the spools and sorts
> it. Sendmail handles outgoing traffic by passing it on to my ISP's
> SMTP server.
> 
> Incidentally, I did some tcpdumps to check for suspicious network
> activity, fearing that my machine had become a spam relay, but there
> does not seem to be anything like that going on. The machine sits
> behind a NAT firewall, with only SSH traffic forwarded to it from The
> World (on a non-standard port).  I also did a tcpdump on the firewall
> machine, just to be sure, and saw nothing unexpected.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- Joe Knapka
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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