Having problems with high CPU usage and apparent memory leak of Exim
- by Dancrumb
I'm having problems with my server and am hoping you can help.
The culprit appears to be exim. The CPU usage is consistently high and the memory usage trends up and up and up for no apparent reason (this is not a heavily used server).
To demonstrate the issue, I ran the following:
root@server [/var/log]# service exim restart; for iter in `seq 0 9`; do date; top -n1 | grep exim; sleep 10; done
Shutting down exim: [ OK ]
Shutting down spamd: [ OK ]
Starting exim: [ OK ]
Sun Jun 6 18:12:07 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 11400 6572 2356 R 51.5 1.3 0:00.92 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:12:18 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 28768 23m 2356 R 57.4 4.6 0:06.75 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:12:28 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 36408 30m 2356 R 55.5 6.0 0:12.59 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:12:39 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 41396 35m 2356 R 53.5 7.0 0:18.35 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:12:49 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 45868 40m 2356 R 47.5 7.8 0:24.06 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:13:00 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 50056 44m 2356 R 55.3 8.6 0:29.84 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:13:10 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 53888 47m 2356 R 55.2 9.4 0:35.63 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:13:21 CDT 2010
62592 root 20 0 56920 50m 2356 R 55.3 9.9 0:41.15 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:13:31 CDT 2010
62592 root 25 0 60380 54m 2356 R 53.4 10.6 0:46.98 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
Sun Jun 6 18:13:42 CDT 2010
62592 root 22 0 63400 57m 2356 R 49.5 11.2 0:52.74 exim
62587 mailnull 18 0 7548 1212 792 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 exim
62588 root 18 0 7536 2052 1648 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 exim
After some time, it gets to a rate of picking up an extra MB every 10s.
I've checked the exim logs and there are no messages coming in there.
exim -bV shows:
Exim version 4.69 #1 built 16-Mar-2009 14:44:43
Copyright (c) University of Cambridge 2006
Berkeley DB: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (February 22, 2005)
Support for: crypteq iconv() IPv6 PAM Perl OpenSSL Content_Scanning Old_Demime Experimental_SPF Experimental_SRS Experimental_DomainKeys
Lookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch dbm dbmnz passwd
Authenticators: cram_md5 dovecot plaintext spa
Routers: accept dnslookup ipliteral manualroute queryprogram redirect
Transports: appendfile/maildir autoreply pipe smtp
Size of off_t: 8
Configuration file is /etc/exim.conf
I'm at something of a loss as to how to proceed. Any recommendations would be well received!