100% CPU long-running children

[E.B.]

No response??

> I recently found two amavis child processes on one of our mail servers
> using 100% of one CPU and running for a very long time. Some questions:
>
> 1. Why would this happen?
> 2. Isn't there a safeguard against this?
> 3. What's best way to handle this situation?
> 4. How to best monitor this in the future?
> 4a. General (non-amavis-specific) server monitor (nagios?) would probably
> have helped identify this earlier. Suggestions for that are invited
>
> I left the processes running for now in case there is anything I can do
> with them to get useful information about them. In ps, they look like
> this:
>
> 2792 ?        R    70151:33 amavisd (ch12-02792-12)
> 11348 ?        R    14120:41 amavisd (ch20-11348-20)