Help Exim ..using 99% CPU for 30 minutes!!!

[rpmws]

Exim is using 99% CPU for 30 minutes. I restart it and it comes back. Making server loads stay at 1.00 1.00 1.00.

I am tailing the exim_maimnlog and it looks normal. spits out a email about every 5 seconds. I killall exim and it comes back. What could it be?????????

 

[rpmws]

Going on 4 hours now ... my loads basically have 1.00 added to what they would normally be. What is causing this / anybody?

 

[AlaskanWolf]

check your sendmail.log might be a spammer

side line: lately on one of my servers, exim has been running quite a long time but not taking any load, nothing out of the ordinary in the logs either

 

[Brian Farkas]

Could be a mailing list... Try running a pstree; if you see more than 5-10 instances of exim running, it\'s probably a mailing list problem.

Just to verify, try doing:
cd /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/qfiles
and grep \"List-Post\" *

When this happened for us, it actually caused the /var partition to fill up, so we had to move the exim directory into the /home partition. If I remember correctly, I think we had to disable the customer\'s mailing lists.

 

[rpmws]

Nope.. I run a tail -f on exim_mainlog and sendmail.log and nothing.. I mean a message about 10 -15 a minute but nothing outragous. I took a look at my traffic graph and no spikes either. I thought maybe someone emailed a 10MB attachment to a few hundred people but nope.

I think i got it fixed. I deleted almost all the stuff in the spool/input folder. There were things in there 3 weeks old.