Pernicious problem with vfork / qmail / qmail-scanner (RESOLVED)
Justin Baugh, KSC
baughj at discordians.net
Sun Mar 14 08:37:10 PST 2004
Justin Baugh wrote:
> I did some testing. I wrote a small program in C to fork off a
> specified number of processes and leave them there. I find that
> I can run exactly 39 processes as qmaild before tcpserver begins
> to barf, saying it cannot fork.
So, after much testing & debugging:
* The problem only happens with tcpserver
* The problem is not replicable in any way under 5.2.1R
* The problem happens with any service/user with tcpserver, not just
qmail-smtpd/qmaild
I set up a testbed on my home box with a vanilla qmail install, and I
wasn't able to get it to choke up. As a workaround (until I can upgrade
the other box to 5.2.1R) I am running qmail through xinetd /
tcpwrappers (heresy, I know), and all is well.
For reference, the box in question was at 5.1-RELEASE-p10, the
vendor-supplied version.
Thanks,
-Justin
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