amavisd-nanny question

[Mark Martinec]

Christian,

> > > Is running amavisd-nanny -c 1 >/dev/null
> > > from cron every hour (or so) sufficient to ensure that?
> > 
> > I guess so, although I'm not doing this myself.
> > It can't hurt to put its output to a log file to be able
> > to investigate past events if need occurs. And if
> > a need for killing a child process arises more often
> > than once in a blue moon, it needs to be investigated.
> 
> @hourly date >> /var/log/mail/amavisd-nanny.log ; amavisd-nanny -c 1
> Something like this?
> 
> Maybe sounds strange, what for is this? I have done this now, but do not
> understand the meaning :)

The amavisd-nanny mainly serves as a monitoring tool to give
you a quick glimps at the state of each child process.

It is also capable of reporting lost (crashed/killed) processes,
and will kill a process which has been busy for more than $activettl
seconds (default 600, i.e. 10 minutes). The later is what Ralf had
in mind, after having observed some inexplicably long running
process.

It should not be necessary to run amavisd-nanny periodically
from cron, just occasionally from an interactive session.
But for an unattended busy site this may be useful,
mitigating the effects of uncontrolled loops.

  Mark