This is all pretty off-topic, not really related to majordomo... But
here goes anyway.
Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta <agi@inittab.org> wrote on Tue, 30 Nov 1999:
> But what worries me more is that the system is not working well. I get
> this errors constantly:
>
> $ps axu
> bash: fork: Resource temporally unavailable.
This means that your system is maxing out on processes, that is the
system does not allow for any more processes to be created (because,
presumably, it's hitting the configured maximum limit). This is not a
good thing. If your system hardware can handle it, you could possibly
configure your OS to handle more processes. A better approach (IMHO)
would be to find out why there are so many processes, and try to fix
that instead... Either use software which doesn't require so many
processes, or use load-balancing among multiple systems to spread out
the load.
> Sendmail stops accepting connections and a lot of incoming mails get
> lost.
If it just stops accepting connections, that doesn't mean in itself that
any emails are lost. If a system refuses to accept an email then
sending that email will be tried later. Only if the delivery has not
succeeded after multiple tries over the span of some time (depending on
the sending MTA, usually in the range of maybe 2 to 5 days), will the
message bounce back to the sender.
On the other hand, I can easily imagine sendmail losing messages if the
system is maxing out on processes. Not that I know that much about
sendmail internals.
> I can't trust that system anymore. Should I replace Sendmail with any
> other MTA?
If sendmail is the reason why the system is maxing out on processes,
then perhaps yes.
Hope this helps,
Mikko
--
// Mikko Hänninen, aka. Wizzu // wiz@iki.fi // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
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