SNMP == Snmpd Not Memory Proof

Some days ago I complained about snmpd having a memory leak in Debian Etch, which seems to be related to the Etch version, as someone commented there. Anyway, todays complaint is against spamassassins spamd and its memory usage:

top – 18:36:15 up 30 days, 5:17, 12 users, load average: 9.60, 4.95, 2.38
Tasks: 170 total, 2 running, 168 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.6%us, 1.4%sy, 0.2%ni, 31.7%id, 66.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.1%st
Mem: 1048576k total, 1041264k used, 7312k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 1048568k total, 695652k used, 352916k free, 35568k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31694 nobody 18 0 565m 360m 2396 D 1 35.2 0:08.45 spamd
23003 root 16 0 565m 344m 2456 D 0 33.6 40:54.15 spamd
27052 nobody 16 0 94216 40m 2456 D 0 3.9 0:29.96 spamd
9241 clamav 15 0 224m 39m 740 S 0 3.8 3:19.17 clamd
31711 nobody 15 0 89856 36m 2464 S 0 3.6 0:00.37 spamd
31750 nobody 16 0 89244 36m 2436 D 1 3.5 0:00.24 spamd
30751 root 15 0 87884 17m 2176 S 0 1.7 0:09.42 spamd

Some spamd processes are using a incredible amount of RAM, sometimes even eating up all memory including swap. I know that a bigger commercial site is suffering from the same problem as it was mentioned in their job interview with me lately.

Spamassassin is invoked by exim4 on my system during SMTP data checks with a condition like:

condition = ${if <{$message_size}{128k}{1}{0}}

So, this should ensure that only mails smaller than 128 kB are passed to spamd by exim. So, either that condition doesn’t work (it should as it’s basically the same as in the exim4 docs) or spamd is a memory hog even with small messages.
I wonder if there’s any method to stop spamassassin from using that much RAM?

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1 thought on “SNMP == Snmpd Not Memory Proof

  1. Hi,

    We've got this problem some times ago, it seems to be fixed upstream in 5.4 branch.
    Backporting 5.4.1 from Sid solved the problem, packages are there :
    [url]http://naquadah.org/~jd/debian/net-snmp/[/url]

    Regards,
    Yack.

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