Too many lmtpd processes running

[Scott Adkins]

--On Thursday, June 26, 2003 10:57 PM +0200 lst_hoe at kwsoft.de wrote:

> Zitat von Rob Tanner <rtanner+cyrus at linfield.edu>:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've just brought up cyrus imap v2.1.13 and I've noticed that there are
>> over lmtpd processes running.  Isn't that a bit excessive?  It's starting
>> to bog down the server.
>>
>
> Limit the number of lmtp clients used by your MTA (Postfix/Sendmail ...)
> to some value your server can stand. Most of the time 2 are enough.
>
> Should go to the FAQ i guess.

I don't think I can agree with your answer :-)  It really depends on the
system and how much mail you pump through it.  It also depdns on how you
do your email delivery.  For instance, in our sendmail configuration, we
queue all incoming mail and use cron jobs to fire off queue runners to
process the various queues we have, with some queues running more often
than others.  If we have 30 sendmail queue runners processing our Cyrus
queue, then we should expect to see 30 LMTP process as well, one for each
of the queue runners that could feed them mail.

As for the original question, you didn't actually state how many LMTP
processes you are seeing.  We typically don't worry about it as long as
we are under 100 processes... when we go over that though, we start
looking at the processes (with LSOF) to see if there are a lot of procs
stuck on a single file (usually a cyrus.header file of a particular user).
This is a lock problem that we have been fighting with for a long time
(we are using 2.0.16) and end up restarting the server to fix it.

So, my suggestion is to look at the LMTP process you have, see if a lot
of them are blocked doing nothing (i.e. probably waiting for a file to
unlock).  If they all look busy, then I wouldn't worry about it.

Scott
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      Scott W. Adkins                http://www.cns.ohiou.edu/~sadkins/
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