Re: Sudden instability

[coffeelover]

for everyone's info.

>> ... only Linux has the three processes ... 

> On 2.4.20-20.9 (RedHat 9), I see one process
> On 2.6.5 (Gentoo), I see three processes.

 The 2.6 production kernel switched to native threads 
2.4 and earlier kernels will have the three processes.
HOWEVER, redhat 9.0 backported the native threads of
the 2.5/2.6 kernel to the 2.4 kernel used in redhat 9.0
same also applies to fedora core1 and of course core2 
which uses native threads. Redhat enterprise 2.1 will
have the three processes on it's 2.4 kernel while
redhat enterprise 3 will show only 1.
  The other linux distributions i am not familiar
enough with to comment but to say unless they used 2.6
or a modified 2.4 kernel then you should get the three
processes.
 Note: i am not a developer but have been using linux
for 10 years plus in production servers (DNS/MAIL/etc)
 -Patrick Main-

PS: I have reported that on my redhat 7.3 based
mail filters i had similar problems and fixed them by
building sendmail without IPv6 support. I am also
running custom kernels without IPv6 support so that may
have been a cause too. The difference with sendmail
without IPv6 support was very positively dramatic. I do
suspect conflict's with using sendmail/rbl filtering
which i still use. disabling rbl filtering at the mta
level solved sendmail's slow intial greeting response.
Disabling IPv6 support allowed me to enable the rbl
filters at the mta/sendmail again. my busiest server is
only a dual PII 450 with 512 ram (dell 4300) handling
about 5000 messages per day for a local small college.