Today my gentoo server that has sat happily churning my mundane (and
lightweight) tasks froze and I noticed when it stopped serving DNS
queries... and the server was even unresponsive from the command
prompt. I rebooted.... and was a bit taken aback at what I found.
The server currently runs, but has a load of over 60, where I'd expect a
load of below 0.1. Investigations using top did not suggest that a
single process was using vast amounts of processing time... but there
were significantly more clamascan processes than I'd expect... and even
more procmail processes....
--
$ ps auwx | grep clamscan | grep -v grep | wc -l
42
$ ps auwx | grep procmail | grep -v grep | wc -l
94
$ ps auwx | grep clamassassin | grep -v grep | wc -l
55
--
The first few lines from top say:
--
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15451 usr 20 0 35944 33m 872 D 2.7 3.3 0:00.60 clamscan
216 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 0:03.80 kswapd0
15116 usr 20 0 76136 15m 668 D 0.7 1.6 0:03.30 clamscan
15299 usr 20 0 2584 1224 840 R 0.7 0.1 0:04.36 top
15428 usr 20 0 61288 57m 872 D 0.7 5.7 0:01.38 clamscan
1 root 20 0 1648 196 172 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.64 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
--
The procmail configuration I've adopted hasn't changed in years...
--
DEFAULT=$HOME/.maildir/
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILDIR=$HOME/.maildir
:0fw
* < 1024000
| /usr/bin/clamassassin | /usr/bin/spamc -f
--
I'm assuming that my suddenly starting to have problems with this is
something to do with an update to clamd/clamassassin... I've a vague
recollection that one or the other of them might have been updated when
I last synchronised and emerged updates... but I can't remember.
Any ideas? This isn't a heavily loaded server usually - I've more
procmail processes than I usually receive in emails in an hour.
Something's wrong - can anyone offer any hints? Has anyone else run
into this problem? Is there a known 'quick fix'?
