[comp.sys.sgi] Sendmail is out of control!

dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) (12/06/90)

This morning, our sendmail is running wild.  Five times so far, it has
started burning CPU time and using enormous amounts of memory.  I just
noticed it, when it was using 14000 pages of virtual memory and 6800
pages of physical memory (out of 20000 pages and 8000 pages on the system)
and had run up 40 minutes of CPU time.  I checked the mail queue, and it
was empty.  I tried sending it signals to force a core dump - a bus error
and a segmentation violation, then just a stop - but it ignored them.
Then it died by itself.  There are a series of messages in the system log,
starting at 5:30 this morning, saying that sendmail was killed due to
insufficient virtual memory.  Has anyone else seen this happen?  This is
on a 4D-240/GTX, with Irix 3.3.1, with the sendmail and sendmail.cf files
from SGI.COM for handling MX records.  We've had this setup since late
October, with no problems.  I don't know of anything that has happened
to the system in the past few days that might be relevant.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds@cb-iris.stanford.edu