Bug#270735: exim4: Self-denial of mail service

[Andreas Metzler]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 12:36:57PM +0100, Greg Kochanski wrote:
> >>How?   It looks in /proc/meminfo .
>> [...]
>> login__~> cat /proc/meminfo
>> cat: 0652-050 Cannot open /proc/meminfo.
>> login__~> uname -a
>> AIX login 2 5 00404A0A4C00

>> The existence of /proc and the files in it are OS-specific. And not
>> only the files itself but also the required data (different OS will
>> require different algoritms for detecting a pending OOM condition).
 
> Quite.  Sarcasm is unnecessary.

No sarcasm intended, just a reality-check.

> I note that /proc/loadavg isn't there on AIX either,
> yet exim somehow manages to obtain the load average
> (or does without).
[...]

see src/os.c. It is ugly enough. But the thing you are proposing
(detecting pending OOM) is a lot more os-specific and difficult. - I
sincerly doubt you could even use the same heuristics for different
Linux-kernels, as the memory managment was rewritten several times.
(e.g. 2.4.8 and 2.4.10 handle swap differently.)
                  cu andreas