Sendmail is eating high memory

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi,

I have installed sendmail on my solaris server. But sendmail its up high memory. its eat upto around 9-10 GB memory.

What to do in this ?

Thanks
NeeleshG

2

9-10 GB of Memory??? Something is very wrong there.

Or are you talking about disk space? In which case you also have a problem but maybe not so severe.

3

yes. it is eating up that much. When I check ps -ef|grep sendmail.. It showed lots of sendmail process running. Then I killed one by one.

But still how to tune it.

Thanks
NeeleshG

4

There are many things to search for first - how many users you have using the sendmail system at the same time, do you have any kind of control like scanners, virus checks, i.e. you need to know what's happening on this mail server. Are there any limitations like : max file size for send/receive, etc. Did you try to restart the sendmail or looking at the logs for errors ? What OS is that and which Sendmail version ?

5

Hi,
We are using sendmail on solaris-9. We are using sendmail just for sending system alerts to us. We have made scripts so that it will send an email if some thing fails or some issues.

We are not using it as a dedicated mail server.
There are no limitations on max file size/send/receive. It is default.

Thanks
NeeleshG

6

Here are some parameters which can affect this.

# limit on number of concurrent queue runners
#O MaxQueueChildren
# how many jobs can you process in the queue?
#O MaxQueueRunSize=0
# maximum number of children we allow at one time
#O MaxDaemonChildren=0
# maximum number of new connections per second
#O ConnectionRateThrottle=0

# Width of the window
#O ConnectionRateWindowSize=60s
# deliver each queued job in a separate process?
#O ForkEachJob=False

# work class factor
#O ClassFactor=1800

# work time factor
#O RetryFactor=90000

# Maximum MIME header length to protect MUAs
#O MaxMimeHeaderLength=2048/1024

# Maximum length of the sum of all headers
#O MaxHeadersLength=32768

# Maximum depth of alias recursion
#O MaxAliasRecursion=10

# location of pid file
O PidFile=/var/run/sendmail.pid

# Prefix string for the process title shown on 'ps' listings
#O ProcessTitlePrefix=prefix

# Data file (df) memory-buffer file maximum size
#O DataFileBufferSize=4096

# Transcript file (xf) memory-buffer file maximum size
#O XscriptFileBufferSize=4096

# lookup type to find information about local mailboxes
#O MailboxDatabase=pw

Please suggest me.
Thanks
NeeleshG

7

Some answers are written really well - take a look at this link for tuning Sendmail.