[ale] procmail using 100's of MB RAM

Joe Knapka jknapka at kneuro.net
Mon Aug 29 04:14:20 EDT 2005


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



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