Wednesday, January 5, 2011

procmail memory issue on VPS

I frequently got "can't allocate more memory" issue on VPS recently, I even can't use "ps" and "top" command to check any process has heavy memory usage because this memory issue.

I checked the system services when the issue was gone temporarily, there is a strange service: procmail, the memory usage is higher than others. The definition from wikipedia is:
Procmail is a mail delivery agent (MDA) capable of sorting incoming mail into various directories and filtering out spam messages. Procmail is widely used

After I killed this process, system will launch it again. I don't know which service is running this command, my solution is to set 0600 mode to /usr/bin/procmail and then kill the running process.
#> chmod 600 /usr/bin/procmail

The memory problem is gone now. I guess the problem is I have lots of cron services running, these services generated lots of messages to root user's mailbox. So, procmail has to allocate huge memory to process these messages.

No comments:

Post a Comment