Lately, I've been having rather high load averages lately on my web/mail server. From what I can tell, the html traffic hasn't gone up that much, so I've got to assume that it's mail-related. Here's the beginning of a "top" that I just ran, sorted by memory usage.
4:17pm up 3 days, 4:55, 4 users, load average: 7.92, 6.89, 6.63
106 processes: 103 sleeping, 1 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 10.1% user, 3.5% system, 0.0% nice, 86.2% idle
Mem: 517672K av, 438920K used, 78752K free, 169292K shrd, 122232K buff
Swap: 705424K av, 0K used, 705424K free 129348K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1737 lordenv_ 0 0 27736 27M 9472 D 0 0.0 5.3 0:06 spamd
1739 lordenv_ 2 0 24744 24M 9656 D 0 0.1 4.7 0:05 spamd
1740 root 5 0 24660 24M 9692 S 0 0.0 4.7 0:04 spamd
1736 root 2 0 24100 23M 9756 S 0 0.0 4.6 0:03 spamd
1738 ebccs 10 0 23948 23M 9776 D 0 0.1 4.6 0:03 spamd
320 root 0 0 21904 21M 9932 S 0 0.0 4.2 0:03 spamd
spamd has all the top marks. Is this normal for spamd?
Spamd is normally quite large, with 20-30mb being the norm, and 50mb not unheard of.
This is why you should limit the number of children spamd spawns with the -m parameter. By default 3.x should limit to 5 children. 2.x has no limits by default.
