Exim Memory Usage [cPanel 11]

[wswd]

Since nobody in the EXIM forums seems to have an answer, I thought I would try here.

Since installing cPanel 11, I have noticed a huge increase in memory usage, possibly a memory leak, since the memory usage starts off low and ends up ridiculously high.

We usually sit around 43% usage. After about 3-4 days, it might be in the low 70's, and after a week or more, in the 90's.

A restart of EXIM takes it right back to 41-43% and the cycle starts all over again.

Anybody else notice this? Aside from having a CRON restart EXIM every few days, is there a fix for this, or anyway around this. If it's helps, I'm using the release build 11.6.0-RELEASE_15076, though this started happening with the first 11 install I put on.

It happens on VPS accounts, ded. servers, and other people we have talked with have also had this issue. Any idea how to fix it?

Thanks in advance!

Bryan

[cpanelkenneth]

Are you certain it's not spamassassin (spamd)?

[bsasninja]

cpanelkenneth why you dont replace spamassassin for ASSP X in Cpanel 11? Is 100% better and not a resource hog.
Also it will not cause load hedeaches to users.

I suggest you set it up at cpanel plugins. Or gives the user the posibility to choose between spamassassin or assp x (as you can do with ftp servers)

Thanks!

[wswd]

Are you certain it's not spamassassin (spamd)?

Not 100% sure...no. That was actually my original assumption.

[sehh]

I'm having the same problem. After lots of searching and testing i found out that:

1) SA is not the problem. It does use a lot of memory and if i limit it to max-children=1 then it uses considerable less memory. Based on my tests it never "leaks", just uses lots of constant memory.

2) Exim has an issue of consuming lots of memory if you are sending thousands of emails. The solution here is to limit the number of emails per domain from WHM.

3) ClamAV is the worst. It leaks like hell and at least once a week i have to "service restart exim" in order to restart the clamd process. It uses huge amounts of memory for no apparent reason.

[wswd]

1) Interesting.

2) The majority of our servers have hardly any e-mail usage.

3) We don't run clam AV

Would be great to figure out what the heck is going on with this.

Thanks for the info!!

[nyjimbo]

.

3) ClamAV is the worst. It leaks like hell and at least once a week i have to "service restart exim" in order to restart the clamd process. It uses huge amounts of memory for no apparent reason.

Once they went to 0.90.x it went crazy. We have a system here just for preprocessing mail for some high volume domains and we had to remove Clam as it was going nuts eating all ram and then everything swapping to disk. They say 0.91 is better but I am going to wait a while before I jump back into it.

[freedman]

I dont experience any of these problems.

occasionally clamd will crash or something, and often the freshclam process gets weird, but a simple restart fixes that.

if the worst thing is to put a cron job to restart clamav, then you're not so bad off :P

but, our servers have minimal cpu and not unreasonable memory utilization with this configuration.

[cpanelkenneth]

wswd, would you mind opening a support ticket so we can determine what is causing this?

[wswd]

Hi Kenneth. Thanks for the reply, will do!

[ANewDay]

clamAV is pretty much useless, most viruses won't affect the linux. It's the person reading the mail that is affected and they usually run antivirus already. ClamAV causes a lot of problems, highly not recommended.

[freedman]

clamAV is pretty much useless, most viruses won't affect the linux. It's the person reading the mail that is affected and they usually run antivirus already. ClamAV causes a lot of problems, highly not recommended.

This is an obsurd statement.

First, as email service providers (and, if you run a hosting business that allows people to use email, then you're an email service provider) you should take whatever steps necessary to protect people from viruses.

I've had NO problems with clamav on any of my servers. The load isn't incredibly high and it's kept a lot of people from getting viruses.
This in turn helps keep my server load down, since, if one of my clients email users were to get a virus that would then resend a bunch of spam through my server, it would get mine blacklisted... So, if you're not doing it for them, do it for yourself.. you need to make sure that nothing coming out of your server is going to get your server blacklisted at the very least.

[cpanelkenneth]

Thanks for that reply, freedman.

[mambovince]

I find ClamAV very usefull for tracking down trojan files when I suspect an account.
Is there also a way to make it run via a cronjob on all public_html folders for all the hosted accounts?

Thanks,

- Vince

[freedman]

I find ClamAV very usefull for tracking down trojan files when I suspect an account.
Is there also a way to make it run via a cronjob on all public_html folders for all the hosted accounts?

check the manpage for clamscan

the most basic way to run it is:
# clamscan -i -r /home

there are some options you might consider.. --no-pe and --noole2 will ignore MS Windows executables and documents.

NOTE: if you're already running clamd, then it should be a tad faster to use clamdscan

If someone wants to get really sophistocated, I'd love to see a script which:
- on first use, does a full scan, and writes the scan start date to a file.
- on subsequent manual use, finds all files modified since then and only scans those files.
-* utilizes "inotify" to actively scan new/modified files


It would be portentially resource intensive to scan all your homedirectories on a regular basis, and it's not necessary, unless you just want to make sure your hard drive is put to good use.