[TriLUG] reducing spamd child process pool

[Brian Henning]

Hi Folks,
   Suddenly today I got a call that some of our internal mysql-backed 
web apps weren't functioning correctly.  The culprit turned out to be 
the server running out of available RAM.

Thing is, this box has a gig of ram.  Up until today, I used to think 
that was a lot..  But top tells me I have less than 100 megs free.  It 
also will sort the process list by %mem footprint.  I see that spamd (at 
2.3%, roughly 25megs) and httpd (at 1.0%, roughly 10megs) are the 
biggest footprints, each with several child processes each chewing up 
the aforementioned amounts of space.

So I figure for the short term, while I examine memory usage and cull 
the number of things running on that server, I can reduce the server 
child process pool for those two services.  For apache, it's easy, just 
a few lines in httpd.conf.   But it doesn't seem to be so 
straightforward to adjust how many child processes spamd keeps in its 
pool.  How do I change that?

Cheers,
~Brian

-- 
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Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
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