Josh M. Hurd wrote:
I have taken over management of a server running courier mail services.
How long has it been in service? What version are you running right now?
I found that MAXDAEMONS was set at 40 and that limit was being reached
in 1-2 seconds after courieresmtpd was restarted.
Did you see connections being dropped and logged in maillog, or did
something else lead you to that conclusion?
We do receive a lot of spam, I counted about 12000 connection attempts
in about 8 hours to the esmtp server.
That's still less than one connection per second, so it seems unlikely
that you'd run over the MAXDAEMONS setting.
I increased the MAXDAEMONS to 128, which helped a bit. Then later to
256 which seems to have helped a bit more.
I am still reaching the max connection limit and maintaining it within
20 or so all day.
I am not seeing a large number of errors in the log besides user
unknown (spam)
Any recent version of Courier will record in the logs any connection
that it drops due to MAXPERC, MAXPERIP, or MAXDAEMONS.
Is setting MAXDAEMONS this high normal? It seems a little extreme to me.
It's definitely abnormal for you to have to increase capasity more than
5x in one day.
Am I just putting a band-aid on a bigger issue?
Does anyone have any ideas of where I should look?
Start by telling us where you have looked. :)