Sendmail and cpu load

JJX · 01-29-2005, 04:15 PM

I was watching my cpu resources. Never gets under ~50%
After watching "top" i saw that sendmail is the consumer

I disable exim
/etc/init.d/sendmail stop
/var/mail/root stop growing (got 60MB!!) but cron still sends mail....

Code:

root       580  0.0  0.0  1756  716 ?        Ss   Jan22   0:09 /usr/sbin/cron
root     18666  0.0  0.1  2044  908 ?        S    02:00   0:00  \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
root     18722  0.0  0.2  6336 1844 ?        S    02:00   0:00      \_ /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -FCronDaemon -oem root

Is any way to prevent programs sending mails,saving cpu resources?

apt-get remove --purge sendmail has no result

dthacker · 01-29-2005, 05:56 PM

JJ
Look the the sendmail log in /var/log/maillog (may vary by distro) and see what sendmail is doing? Is there a program that is sending lots of messages to root? Is there a huge mail queue that sendmail is attempting to process? Are you configured to receive mail locally on this computer?

JJX · 01-30-2005, 02:47 AM

/var/log/mail.info:

Code:

Jan 30 12:48:51 skilla sm-msp-queue[27588]: j0PAfgMf007356: to=root, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=5+00:07:09, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=32430317, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
Jan 30 12:48:51 skilla sm-msp-queue[27588]: j0PAfgMf007356: j0UAgM7e027588: sender notify: Cannot send message for 5 days
Jan 30 12:48:51 skilla sm-msp-queue[27588]: j0UAgM7e027588: to=root, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=31586, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]

same in /var/log/mail.log

How can i find the application doing these attempts?

dthacker · 01-30-2005, 08:51 AM

Hi JJK,
This log show root trying to send email to localhost. A host or sendmail configuration problem is preventing the mail from being sent, so it's queueing up. As sendmail tries to process the ever increasing queue, it consumes your CPU. I'm not much of a sendmail expert but I have a couple of things for you to try. 1) Verify that localhost is in your /etc/hosts file. 2) Try running sendmail from the command line. (on my SuSE box, it's /usr/lib/sendmail -v, Debian may have a different path to sendmail) Enter a test message, then hit . on an empty line to send it. See if the output gives you any ideas on configurations to check. Good Luck!

Dave