Adam, your awsome.

Just happened to be walking by the server this evening, and the drives
where cranking away.

I real quick used lsof and noticed a ton of enties pointing to the
/var/spool/clientmqueue folder.  I went an checked the folder, and there
where 389,120 messages in it.  They where 2 messages coming from a cron
job that was running every 10 minutes, then another one every 4 hours
saying that it could not get the original messages delivered and
continuted to do so for 5 days until it gave up trying to deliver the
message to root.

Deleted all of the messages, thrashing stopped.

Next question... how do I make sure that my cron job doesn't try to send a
message to root when it runs?

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.

Jim

> smmsp is the sendmail submission queue runner.  It's a seperate sendmail
> process that runs /var/spool/clientmqueue, which I believe is where
> Sendmail drops outbound messages before delivery (for security through
> privelege seperation).  You might have a bunch of messages in the queue
> that it's trying to process.
>
> If that queue is empty, use lsof or fstat to see what files the smmsp
> user has open when the problem starts.
>
> On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Jim Streit wrote:
>
>> I have recently noticed a weird thing happening on a server that I
>> have.  A few times a day, the drives on my server start thrashing,
>> like they are doing a massive read or write.  If I look at TOP while
>> this is happening the only thing that really shows active CPU cycles
>> is sendmail.  It uses about 8% of the processing power of the box.
>> After about 10 minutes, the thrashing stops and that sendmail thread
>> stops (user smmsp).  During the thrashing there isn't any noticeable
>> performance slowdown.
>>
>> The Box...
>> IBM Netserver 5000
>> 2 GB RAM
>> Dual PIII 550
>> 3x18 gb hot-swap scsi drives (RAID 5)
>> Redhat 9.0 (with all of the latest RedHat up2date updates)
>> Sendmail 8.12.8-6.90
>>
>> Anyone have any ideas on what my be causing this?
>>
>> --
>> Jim Streit
>> Partner & Co-Founder
>> NorthLANs Alliance, LLC
>> JimStreit at northlans.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>>
>
> Adam Maloney
> Systems Administrator
> Sihope Communications
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list





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