[tpop3d-discuss] Tpop 1.4.2 memory leak?: fork_child: fork: Not enough space

[Rich, WhidbeyNET]

Today during our maintenance window, we implemented tpop3d on 2 
production Sun Ultra 10's which each have 512mb memory. Each machine 
handles about 3 pop3 sessions per second.

Both machines ran fine for 6.5 hours, before the tpop3d daemon could no 
longer fork child processes. All remaining connections were 
"disconnected" safely by tpop3d, and tpop3d continued to run, but would 
no longer answer requests on port 110. The last error in the log was:

"fork_child: fork: Not enough space"

A vmstat on the machine showed that there was plenty of system memory 
available AFTER the tpop3d stopped responding. Disk space was also less 
than 10% consumed.

 From looking at the code, the error is generated from a -1 return code 
when trying to call fork().  Has enyone encountered a memory leak with 
tpop3d, and has it been corrected in the CVS?

This is pretty serious, as it affected two Solaris 9 machines at the 
same time, so it's unlikely a machine-specific problem. We were/are 
ready to implement tpop3d systemwide.

Thanks as usual for any info! Chris? :)

Rich Sandberg
richs@whidbey.net
Network Administrator
WhidbeyNet Network Operations