[CLUE-Tech] sendmail problem, busy server?

[Grant Johnson]

How hard is the CPU running?  If it is not running very hard (less than 50% 
or so on top) you may be able to exchange some additional CPU overhead for 
not having to have the daemon running all of the time.  I run sendmail from 
inetd, and although spawning the processes takes some CPU overhead, any 
changes I make to settings are immediate (I do not have to restart 
sendmail) and any intentionally nasty messages that try to crash sendmail 
with buffer overflows do not work, instead, they just crash that one message.

This would run your CPU harder, but it may be worth it, if it fixes your 
problem.  On my machine, a celeron 366 with 128M of ram, I/O (network and 
IDE) are the bottleneck rather than CPU.  I mailbombed myself to see what 
happened (30,000 emails as fast as the network card would take them), and 
although it took a bit for all of the spawned sendmails to finish, and it 
used a LOT of memory to do so, the CPU never went past 20 or 30%.