So I noticed that I hadn't received any email today and went digging.
courierd wasn't running. I started it and received a huge flood or
messages.
Checking the logs I found this message:
Dec 6 04:24:21 quattro courierd: SHUTDOWN: respawnhi limit reached.
and then for the next couple of hours until I forcefully stopped it and
restarted it:
Dec 6 04:24:53 quattro courierd: Waiting. shutdown time=none, wakeup
time=none, queuedelivering=1, inprogress=1
Searching a bit, I see I had the same problem someone else had:
http://www.ultraviolet.org/mail-archives/courier.2001/5628.html
The mail server is busy much of the time, but I don't think it's busy
enough to naturally hit the respawnhi timeout. It looks like somehow
courier missed that a child finished and that's why it hit the respawnhi
timeout.
The system is Linux 2.2 running Courier 0.35.1. I had planned on
upgrading to 0.36.1, but I don't see anything in the changelogs about
this.
I did *not* specify the --with-waitfunc option during configure. It was
built from the included spec file.
JE