Do you have any suggestion as to what might be triggering a fatal hanging of
clamav-milter on my server?

This is FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE (cvsup about march 25th), with sendmail
8.12.11/8.12.11, clamav0.70 from ports (but it showed up the same with
0.67-1)

When this happens, I see a lot of clamav-milter processes equally partaging
100% cpu (see attached ps output), with uptime showing a load of [n. of
milter processes], and sendmail stopping processing mail due to excessive
system load.

I even tried lowering the -max-children from 50 to 5, but this parameter is
obviously not controlling the number of processes.

The mail log doesn't contain anything particularly vicious, the only strange
thing is a lot of '<host> did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during
connection to MTA' (about 4 to 10 per hour) with <host> every time different
and having nothing to do with this server (which is a company mail server
with very little roaming usage, and at most 1000-2000 messages per day)
System log is absolutely quiet, while clamd.log (fragment atached) shows
some strange behaviour. Tonight, for example, at about midnight, it seems
the database was reloaded, and since then the virus-rate dropped from 10-20
per hour to 2 in 6 hours. I suppose this might be the initial event.

It all seems to have begun last week when I also installed spamass-milter on
the same server, but that may be coincidence, because since the same day the
server became the primary MX for the domain, while previously it had an
upstream mail server intercepting viruses, and so clamd was a lot more idle
than now.

Thanks for any hints,
Angelo.
25763  ??  Ss     0:01.92 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26787  ??  R    134:31.79 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26794  ??  R    133:26.22 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26798  ??  R    132:56.27 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26908  ??  R    119:25.82 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26927  ??  R    117:25.31 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
26976  ??  R    115:13.21 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
27213  ??  R     99:53.27 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
28779  ??  R     21:13.64 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
28875  ??  R     16:27.23 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p
29325  ??  R      1:16.21 /usr/local/sbin/clamav-milter --local --outgoing -d -N 
--max-children=5 --postmaster=aturetta+virus --p

Attachment: clamd-fragment.log
Description: Binary data

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