Sendmail and high kernel CPU utilisation

[Derek Ragona]

Travis,

This may be from someone mail bombing your server with large email 
attachments.  However, you should increase the logging by sendmail adding 
or changing the sendmail option:
-O LogLevel=80

Usually this is set in /etc/rc.conf.  I find 80 is pretty good for showing 
a lot of detail.  Then you can look in your sendmail log in 
/var/log/maillog for what sendmail is actually doing.

Hope this helps.

         -Derek


At 08:56 PM 6/18/2006, Travis Fitch wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I was hoping someone might be able to shed some light on an issue I am
>having with sendmail on FreeBSD 5.2.1 running on a Sun V120.
>
>If you look at the snippet from top you can see that several sendmail
>process are casing the kernel to use ~ 65% of the CPU. I am having some
>issues profiling what is causing this issue. You can also see the load is
>quite high.
>
>last pid: 72705;  load averages: 12.22, 12.29, 12.00
>up 1+06:09:44  11:42:28
>86 processes:  14 running, 72 sleeping
>CPU states: 35.5% user,  0.0% nice, 64.5% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0%
>idle
>Mem: 148M Active, 104M Inact, 73M Wired, 520K Cache, 60M Buf, 131M Free
>Swap: 2057M Total, 102M Used, 1954M Free, 4% Inuse
>
>   PID USERNAME  PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
>20958 root      122    0 23368K  5472K RUN     44:32  8.64%  8.64% sendmail
>62864 root      122    0 23432K  5528K RUN     10:45  8.54%  8.54% sendmail
>70522 root      122    0 23448K  5544K RUN      2:43  8.35%  8.35% sendmail
>91279 smmsp     122    0 12224K  3832K RUN     60:17  8.25%  8.25% sendmail
>66302 root      122    0 23392K  5472K RUN      8:36  8.25%  8.25% sendmail
>16850 root      122    0 23432K  5528K RUN     51:31  8.20%  8.20% sendmail
>66306 root      121    0 23448K  5528K RUN      8:34  8.11%  8.11% sendmail
>68330 root      121    0 23432K  5528K RUN      5:37  8.11%  8.11% sendmail
>51654 root      121    0 23392K  5472K RUN     16:40  8.06%  8.06% sendmail
>66377 root      121    0 23392K  5472K RUN      8:22  8.01%  8.01% sendmail
>69364 root      121    0 23432K  5504K RUN      3:50  8.01%  8.01% sendmail
>
>
>The other interesting thing is that a lot of the SMTP connections hang
>around for quite some time. These connection just keep building up and
>slowly bring the system to a crawl.
>
>correo:root# ps aux| grep -v grep | grep sendmail
>root   62864  8.0  1.1 23432 5528  ??  R    10:06AM  10:49.58 sendmail:
>k5J06CMN062864 mx02.globalcenter.net.au [203.89.192.35]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   66306  8.0  1.1 23448 5528  ??  R    10:18AM   8:38.72 sendmail:
>k5J0IoxC066306 omta02ps.mx.bigpond.com [144.140.83.154]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   66377  7.9  1.1 23392 5472  ??  R    10:20AM   8:26.25 sendmail:
>k5J0KHGa066377 vpn02.commandhub.net [203.89.202.122]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   20958  8.0  1.1 23368 5472  ??  R     5:14AM  44:36.44 sendmail:
>k5IJF2bd020958 [83.173.162.41]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   68330  8.0  1.1 23432 5528  ??  R    10:43AM   5:41.33 sendmail:
>k5J0hOAk068330 mx01.globalcenter.net.au [203.89.192.34]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   69364  8.0  1.1 23432 5504  ??  R    10:59AM   3:54.45 sendmail:
>k5J0xmg6069364 omta05ps.mx.bigpond.com [144.140.83.195]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   70522  8.0  1.1 23448 5544  ??  R    11:11AM   2:47.79 sendmail:
>k5J1BY7Y070522 mx01.globalcenter.net.au [203.89.192.34]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   66302  8.0  1.1 23392 5472  ??  R    10:18AM   8:40.20 sendmail:
>k5J0If8t066302 vpn02.commandhub.net [203.89.202.122]: DATA (sendmail)
>smmsp  91279  8.0  0.7 12224 3832  ??  Rs    4:01AM  60:20.92 sendmail:
>Queue runner at 00:10:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue (sendmail)
>root   16850  8.0  1.1 23432 5528  ??  R     4:30AM  51:34.91 sendmail:
>k5IIUaWm016850 [201.150.67.51]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   51654  8.0  1.1 23392 5472  ??  R     9:37AM  16:44.52 sendmail:
>k5INbbYo051654 vpn02.commandhub.net [203.89.202.122]: DATA (sendmail)
>root   91276  0.0  1.0 22928 5032  ??  Ss    4:01AM   0:03.05 sendmail:
>rejecting connections on daemon MSA: load average: 12 (sendmail)
>
>I have rebuilt the world and kernel to see if the resolves my issue, but
>alas no luck.
>
>Hopefully someone will be able to point be in the right direction.
>
>Regards,
>
>Travis
>
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This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support.