saslauthd using too much memory

Posted by Brian Armstrong on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Brian Armstrong
Published on 2010-08-24T16:59:57Z Indexed on 2012/04/15 17:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 501

Filed under:
|
|

Woke up today to see my site slow/unresponsive. Pulled up top and it looks like a ton of saslauthd processes have spun up using about 64m of RAM each, causing the machine to enter swap space. I've never seen this many used on there.

top - 16:54:13 up 85 days, 11:48,  1 user,  load average: 0.32, 0.50, 0.38
Tasks: 143 total,   1 running, 142 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.3%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  1.4%st
Mem:   1048796k total,  1025904k used,    22892k free,    14032k buffers
Swap:  2097144k total,   332460k used,  1764684k free,   194348k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                  
  848 admin     20   0  263m 115m 4840 S    0 11.3   5:02.91 ruby                                                                                      
  906 admin     20   0  265m 113m 4828 S    0 11.1   5:37.24 ruby                                                                                      
30484 admin     20   0  248m  91m 4256 S    6  9.0 219:02.30 delayed_job                                                                               
 4075 root      20   0  160m  65m  952 S    0  6.4   0:24.22 saslauthd                                                                                 
 4080 root      20   0  162m  64m  936 S    0  6.3   0:24.48 saslauthd                                                                                 
 4079 root      20   0  162m  64m  936 S    0  6.3   0:24.70 saslauthd                                                                                 
 4078 root      20   0  164m  63m  936 S    0  6.2   0:24.66 saslauthd                                                                                 
 4077 root      20   0  163m  62m  936 S    0  6.1   0:24.66 saslauthd                                                                                 
 3718 mysql     20   0  312m  52m 3588 S    1  5.1   3499:40 mysqld                                                                                    
  699 root      20   0 72744 7640 2164 S    0  0.7   0:00.50 ruby                                                                                      
15701 postfix   20   0  106m 5712 4164 S    1  0.5   0:00.50 smtpd                                                                                     
15702 postfix   20   0 52444 3252 2452 S    1  0.3   0:00.06 cleanup                                                                                   
 4062 postfix   20   0 41884 3104 1788 S    0  0.3 125:26.01 qmgr                                                                                      
15683 root      20   0 51504 2780 2180 S    0  0.3   0:00.04 sshd                                                                                      
14595 postfix   20   0 52308 2548 2304 S    1  0.2   0:24.60 proxymap                                                                                  
15483 postfix   20   0 43380 2544 1992 S    0  0.2   0:00.38 smtp                                                                                      
15486 postfix   20   0 43380 2544 1992 S    0  0.2   0:00.36 smtp                                                                                      
15488 postfix   20   0 43380 2540 1992 S    0  0.2   0:00.38 smtp                                                                                      
15485 postfix   20   0 43380 2532 1984 S    0  0.2   0:00.36 smtp                                                                                      
15489 postfix   20   0 43380 2532 1984 S    0  0.2   0:00.40 smtp 

Wasn't sure what Saslauthd is, Google says it handles plantext authentication. The machine has been sending a lot of email through postfix, so this could be related.

Anyone know why so many may have spun up? Are they safe to kill? Thanks!

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about postfix

Related posts about emailserver