Sam,
OK, I am convinced - will delete . .
Thanks,
Phil.
On 2015-06-21 09:12, Sam Clippinger via spamdyke-users wrote:
IMHO, everyone should delete the softlimit program from their servers
immediately. Not that I have a strong opinion on the matter or
anything. :)
The softlimit program seems like a good idea -- set an upper limit on
the amount of RAM a program can use, to guard against memory leaks
(but not buffer overflows). In practice however, it causes far far
more problems than it causes. When a program hits the limit, it always
happens inside a library function and not the application itself. So
the user sees strange errors from glibc or OpenSSL functions that are
never related to memory allocation. Those errors always look like real
bugs, because there's never any indication the limit was hit.
There's also no way to even estimate how much memory is "correct".
Does anyone really understand how many libraries a program loads and
how much memory they need? spamdyke uses OpenSSL and on some systems,
separate libraries for math and DNS functions. Unpatched qmail doesn't
use many libraries, but if patches have been applied to allow TLS or
authentication, it may use many (who uses unpatched qmail anyway?). If
vpopmail is in use, it may need MySQL, depending on how it was
compiled. If the server is configured to use stack guarding or memory
profiling, the virtual memory use could be astronomical. Every guide
I've ever read says to use trial-and-error to find the lowest value
that appears to work, then double (or triple) it. Crazy!
I've spent way way too much time trying to track down "bugs" that were
caused by softlimit and I finally reached my own limit this year.
That's why spamdyke 5.0.1 examines the limits it starts with and, if
it can, resets them. It can't undo "hard limits" set by the ulimit
program, but it can (and does) undo softlimit.
-- Sam Clippinger
On Jun 20, 2015, at 2:05 PM, Philip Rhoades via spamdyke-users
<spamdyke-users@spamdyke.org> wrote:
People,
I played around with the logging verbosity and found if I used debug
mode I saw suggestions (commands!?) in the log about remove the
softlimit function from the start script for qmail-smtpd - while I
was trying to sort out the last bug that was preventing eQmail from
working, I did actually do that - is the softlimit function even
necessary these days on a lightly loaded server with 8GB RAM?
Thanks,
Phil.
--
Philip Rhoades
PO Box 896
Cowra NSW 2794
Australia
E-mail: p...@pricom.com.au
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--
Philip Rhoades
PO Box 896
Cowra NSW 2794
Australia
E-mail: p...@pricom.com.au
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