From: David Alexander (Dalexangreyhound.com)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 12:20:24 CDT

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>The fork() call is executed while the process runs with "postfix"
>privileges. Perhaps there is some system-imposed per-user process
>limit that it runs into.

Under AIX, there is a limit of processes that may be run by a user - though I don't believe that this is configurable on a per-user basis.

On this system, that limit had been set at 150... and it appears to affect root as well.

Root's number of processes when this behavior was noted was very nearly 150 - so we've identified the culprit. Raising this limit now has me happily delivering. Postfix's number of processes was 10-20 at max. The lowest configurable process limit under AIX is 40 - so we know we weren't running into *that*.

So, curiously, it appears that the local delivery process was subject to root's process limit. Since the process should be running with "postfix" privleges, why would this be? Have we identified an AIX-ism (trust me, there are tons of them) that causes at least an inital fork to occur as root, regardless of the user requesting said fork?

>However, I would like to avoid changing Postfix so it does more
>things as root. Such would appear to be the way of Sendmail.

It is the fact that Postfix does so few things as root that makes it my MTA of choice.

Thanks again for your help,

- Dave

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